Shannon Ha – Looking Outwards 08

Mimi Son is a Korean Interaction Designer who studied at Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design and Landsdown Centre of Middlesex University in London. She currently teaches Interactive Storytelling at Kaywon School of Art and Design and is the director of her own studio, Kimchi and Chips alongside Elliot Woods. Their studio focuses on novel interactions involving people and media materials, discovering new technical and artistic paradigms. Coming from an artistic background she enjoys observing her surroundings and uses her observations as inspiration for creating something interactive and funny.  

Her current work studies the emotional and tangible interaction for future life and the effects of technology from creative approach. In particular, she creates speculative visual objects that has unpredictable reactions when touched with technology. She mentions in her talk that she is quite experimental in the way she works and there is not that much ‘meaning’  behind her artistic choices and I think I can definitely relate to her in a way that my own creative process is also more random and less technical. I think it’s interesting to compare the balance between storytelling and randomness in her variety of work. In her work Link (2010), the installation is a lot more about user interaction as it invites users to record their stories into a city scape of cardboard boxes (see image) and it explores the agency that individuals have over technology. In contrast, her piece called Line Segment Space (2013) is a lot more abstract and undefined and it focuses more on on the viewers emotional with the space that is filled with with dynamic forms created by light and lines. 

I used a grace day for this project.