Mike Tucker is an interactive designer and director at a company, MagicLeap, that focuses on the future of spatial computing. With his skills of audio-visual exploration, he was able to collaborate with Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood and Encyclopedia Pictura in creating Kanye West’s video game. He has also worked with Universal Everything(I have blogged about before in Looking-Outwards 05) which is a collection of designs and digital art which pertains to technology and humanities curated by a man named Matt Pyke.
A peak into the virtual app created by MagicLeap, Tónandi.Spatial Design for Tónandi
Tucker has worked with various concepts and projects such as hand and eye-tracking, spatial controllers and optics. Spatial music interactivity became his next experiment when he was collaborating with Sigur Rós and MagicLeap.
Tucker states that he hopes to inspire and to enhance the minds of spatial designers all over the world by providing a new mindset of approaching technology and utilizing it to be able to design a “mixed-reality future”.
Meejin Yoon is an architect and designer, currently teaching at MIT as a Professor in the Department of Architecture. She graduated from Cornell University with a Bachelor in Architecture, and then completed her graduate studies at Harvard’s GSD. Her work focuses on the intersection between space, technology, and materiality, and is most often acclaimed for its innovative and engaging characteristics.
Shadow Play by Howeler + Yoon
I really admire Yoon’s consideration to public engagement in her projects. I think by prioritizing how humans would engage with the spatial qualities of a project, Yoon is able to create very deliberate and intricate experiences that are unparalleled to other public establishments. For example, her project, Shadow Play, creates a unique experience for users by taking advantage of a neglected public space in Phoenix. Yoon creates shade in the desert sun and facilitates air circulation through each cell of her public parasol. The project creates interesting shadows due to the hexagonal formatting of her steel plates, which adds an interesting design element to supplement the project’s strong functional purpose.
During her talk at the Eyeo Festival, she focuses on her projects regarding interactive public spaces– especially topics such as responsive and interactive technology, smart materials, and the public engagement process. Her talk was interesting in that by narrowing it down to specific topics, she was able to choose only a few projects that utilize the technology in depth. And by going through the development process, the audience is able to grasp a deeper understanding the iterations as well as inspirations for the projects
For this week’s Looking Outward, I watched a lecture by John Underkoffler titled “Animating Spirit”. John is an interface designer and CEO of oblong industries. His company’s mission is “to provision the world with new computing forms of genuine value and durable worth, forms profoundly capable, human, beautiful, and exhilarating”. He is based in Los Angeles, California, and received his Ph.D at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Media Arts and Sciences.
His work largely focuses on creating novel, “human-first” user interfaces. This is really fascinating to me and I admire the way he pushes the boundaries of the existing technologies and interfaces that are used today, and pushes his team to design novel ones. In particular, I really like one of his projects called g-speak. G-speak is a spatial operating environment and novel computing platform that allows designers to collaborate with other users and design spatial, distributed applications across multiple screens and platforms.
g-speak enables the development of multi-user, multi-screen, multi-device, spatial, distributed applications.
His lecture was very engaging because of the way he explains complex concepts and ideas in understandable language to someone who may not be familiar with the jargon. I also enjoyed the way he came across as very approachable. He mentions at the beginning how nervous he is, which adds to his charisma when he calmly and eloquently delivers his lecture.
This week, I wanted to look at Eyeo 2019 speaker Nicole Aptekar. Nicole Aptekar is a computational designer who utilizes three-dimensional rendering techniques and transfers them to physical mediums through lazor cutting techniques. For many of her works, Nicole develops custom software to generate these design. One of my favorite series is Metaflux, which is shown below. The compositions below consist of layers of paper stacked on top of each other to develop these beautiful forms that take advantage of light and shadows. As you can see, Nicole is really focused on geometric form and geared towards understanding how these forms and work in harmony with each other.
Project from Metaflux SeriesProject from Metaflux Series
In her talk, Nicole talks a lot about how her work revolves around finding that middle ground where the physical and digital mediums meet. She tells her story through visually and verbally showcasing her work and how it relates to her as a designer and human. In her presentation, she also breaks the fourth wall and really talks to the audience as a friend. Her use of both digital and physical technologies to create novel art embodies her mission of pushing fabrication techniques and conventions.
Kim Rees is the Head of Information Visualization at Periscopic, a socially conscious data visualization firm based in Portland, Oregon. Kim has garnered many awards and has presented herself to be a prominent figure in the world of information visualization. Kim’s work has been featured in the MOMA, the Parsons Journal of Information Mapping, and was an award winner in the VAST 2010 Challenge.
I really admire her work because she is taking her skills of creating beautiful pieces of information visuals to talk about bigger societal issues that are needed in this day and age. Below is one of her famous works regarding gun violence. What many don’t understand is that there is an overwhelming magnitude of loss from US gun deaths. The orange line depicts the person that died, and the white line that continues from the orange depicts how long they could’ve lived for. By this heart-wrenching visual, its easy to see how many years of life were stolen at the hands of guns.
An example of what Kim Rees did at Periscopic to visually describe gun violence
To see the whole visual from above come to life, click the link below:
While Kim Rees was unable to showcase her works with Periscopic at Eyeo, her talk on the future of data was inspiring. She was not afraid to seem controversial and had great insights into privacy, actualized data, and more. Kim values open data and believes that using more and more data can help solve social issues. Watch her talk below at Eyeo 2014.
Video of Kim Rees’s talk at the 2014 Eyeo Festival
Eyeo 2015 – Jesse Louis Rosenburg and Jessica Rosenkrantz
Jesse Louis-Rosenberg and Jessica Rosenkrantz use their background in architecture, biology, and computer science to fuel their work in computational design for digital fabrication. Together, they started the Nervous System Lab, in which they applied their expertise in digital fabrication and knowledge of generative forms to create products such as jewelry, lighting fixtures, and customizable dresses.
I’m really interested in how they were able to take 3-d printing, which is seen as for producing volumes, and were able to create essentially the fabric of a dress that moves and drapes much like more conventional fabric. It would be interesting to see more of the parametric logic behind the dress.
Elliot Woods is a digital media artist, educator, and technologist based in Manchester UK. With the goal of creating a bridge between digital and contemporary arts, he strives to build “future interactions between humans and social-visual design technologies like projectors, graphical computation, and cameras” (Woods). As a result, Woods co-founded the experimental art and design technology studio in Seoul called Kimchi and Chips. In this unique studio, several installation projects were developed, the most recent being “Halo.” 99 robotic mirrors would constantly trace the direction of sun throughout the day, and they would each emit a ray of sunlight into a cloud of water mist. Applying the Bayesian inference machine learning, Woods recreated the beams so they would computationally align to draw bright halos into the air. As this installation completely depends on the presence of the sun to function, it explores the limitless end of technology, striving to even capture the natural fluctuations into technology. What intrigued me most was how Woods would utilize his deep physics background to generate interfaces with abstract systems and approach his artistic endeavors in a step by step methodical approach.
Full size view of the halo formed from the cloud of water mistProcess sketch of how the halo circle was computationally defined3D simulation of the halo
Ben Fry is a data visualization expert and principal of Fathom Information Design, a design and software consultancy in Boston. He received his PhD in Computational Information Design from the Aesthetics and Computation Group at the MIT Media Lab. He also co-developed Processing, which he has received awards for.
Fry’s work focuses on data visualization as a means to help audiences understand and digest dense amounts of information. I really admire Fry’s portfolio because his visualizations are not only aesthetically pleasing, but also manipulate complex information to be easily digestible.
I was particularly interested in No Ceilings: The Full Participation Project. It visualizes over 850,000 data points from the last twenty years on gains women and girls have made around the world in terms of health, education, economic participation and social inclusion. As a woman myself, visually seeing what kinds of progress we have made in different sectors really inspired me.
Video overview of No Ceilings: The Full Participation Project.
Fry not only effectively visualizes data but also effectively discusses it as well. He thoroughly explains the background to his work as well as the actual work itself by going through it with the audience, giving them that comprehensive understanding that I want my work to have too.
Liam Young is an Australian born architect who is situated within the areas of design, fiction, and future. His works are well known for incorporating the boundaries among fiction, storytelling, design, and film, where its goal is to image and prototype the future of city. Young’s works deviate from how architects normally practice their fields (deviated from tradition), which did cause some controversy within the architectural world. In a project called “Under Tomorrow’s Sky,” Liam Young gathered ideas of madness, visionaries, speculative gamers, literary astronauts, digital poets, and luminaries to create a future city of his own. Like this, Liam Young often escapes from the norm and sees architecture and design from a whole different perspective, which really caught my attention and made me realize how much an artist can be so creative in expressing ideas into his work. The fact that Liam Young was successfully able to think outside the box and express his definition of art to his work inspired me to also express my creative ideas into my work as well.
Heather Knight’s lecture on charismatic technology creation in 2011.
For this week’s Looking Outwards, I watched Heather Knight’s lecture from the 2011 Eyeo festival on charismatic and beneficial technology creation — namely, how to build robots that work alongside and benefit people. Heather has a degree in Electrical Engineering from MIT, a PhD in Robotics from CMU (!!), and a postdoc from Stanford exploring minimal robots and autonomous car interfaces. She worked in Paris for a few years at the start of her career before returning to the MIT Media Lab to work on a robot called “Kismet” under Dr. Cynthia Breazeal. This was her segway into the realm of robotics, as it enabled her to see what it meant to work on an interactive, human-like robot (Kismet was meant to be a functional robot head).
Heather is immensely passionate about “social robotics,” the study of technology with social intelligence that can communicate with us in human terms. She strives to understand how we can build robot interfaces that adjust to human needs, not the other way around. This made me realize that Heather was, in a way, a pioneer in social/autonomous robotics; she was discussing the concepts of ethics in robots and human-technology interaction way back in 2011, well before any of the technologies of today were developed!
Due to her affinity for technology, the performing arts, and entertainment, Heather started working for Syyn Labs, an creative technology group that, as described on their website, “fuses the worlds of technology and interactive sciences with artistic mediums to design and construct visually dynamic spectacles that inspire thought and provoke conversation.” There, she began working on the installation of robots in music videos while developing her own robot theater company, Marilyn Monrobot. It’s an unconventional path, but it’s what led to her working on the OK Go Rube Goldberg machine in their music video “This Too Shall Pass,” one of the most famous music videos in YouTube’s existence! Heather managed the top floor of the machine, or roughly the first 2 minutes of the video. I remember watching this video multiple times growing up and marveling at its artistic complexity, so it was really cool learning about Heather’s involvement in the project.
The Rube Goldberg machine that Heather and Syyn Labs helped build for OK Go.
Overall, I think what I admired most about Heather’s talk was her ability to ground and personify robots. Robots are inherently cold, mechanistic beings, but Heather’s passion for the subject matter and artistic understandings allowed her to find a way to bring robots to life charismatically. It’s evident in her presentation style too; she’s loose, lively, and a whole lot of fun to listen to. It’s her charisma that rubs off on her robots most, and I love the fact that her projects all seem to be passion projects. Today, she’s an Assistant Professor of Robotics at Oregon State University, where she runs the—you guessed it—CHARISMA research group, which uses entertainment and artistic influences to develop Social Robots. It’s exciting work that’s befitting of her energetic nature.
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