↑ project exhibition at Art Center
A home fully equipped with sensors promises efficency and effectiveness in saving resources and automating helpful services. Will the abundance of domestic data inspire the desire to tap into these data recordings as a way to retell and remember special moments? How might this affect our current appreciation for collecting keepsakes and nostalgic momorabilia which we use to look back on our first kiss, our most infamous high school party, or the progressive growth of our children growing up?
↑ growth
↑ intimate moment
↑ a loud event
It won't be long before devices like our smart phones will be able to automatically capture sensor data about where we go, whom we meet, and what we do there. Could the capacity to gather large amounts of real-time data inspire new kinds of storytelling systems targeted towards a more personalized form of home entertainment? Would the stories that these systems create systematically borrow from our familiar narratives, or might they inform new ones? Could this kind of system provide an opportunity for self reflection, or would it just become a more personalized form of soap opera entertainment?
↑ hyper-personal puppet theatre
Currently we use sensor devices as a way to monitor our personal performance, helping us to run faster or measure the amount of sleep we get. Could our current applications of sensor data as a way to measure personal performance be extended to a social scope, such as the success of a social meeting? Will this lead to a "sciencification" of everyday experiences, enabling us to obsess about and analyse specific situations? Will web-based services such as algorithmic matchmaking provide cutstom devices for recording and analysis? What role might these artifacts play when retelling what we currently perceive to be our most intangible, fleeting moments?
↑ playback device for sensor recordings of social situations
↑ creating a visual output and sonification of the recorded data
↑ the interchangeable medium contains data tracks for two people
Conversation
Distance
Eye Contact
Heartbeat
Temperature
Kjen Wilkens - Principal Investigator
kjenwilkens.com
Kjen is an interaction designer & technologist interested in future applications and implications of emerging technologies. His experiences include founding a design consulting firm as well as working with various industry and research institutions such as Microsoft Research, the Fraunhofer Institute for Medical Image Computing, ARUP and Art Center College of Design.
He holds an MA in Design Interactions from the Royal College of Art (RCA), a BS in Digital Media / Computer Science from the University of Bremen as well as certificates in entrepreneurship and global leadership from the London School of Economics, Beijing University and Imperial College London.
Aurelia Friedland - Research Assistant
aureliafriedland.com
Aurelia Friedland is an artist and designer currently earning a graduate degree at Art Center College of Design's Media Design Program (MDP). After earning a BFA in Communication Design from Carnegie Mellon University, her interests led her to explore public art, puppetry, and eventually down the path towards education reform. With 10 years of living in Pittsburgh, she developed a strong appreciation for the creativity which is empowered by underdevelopment. She’s intrigued by the contradictions inherent within our developing present and impending future: the increasing homogeny of urbanization and technologization meeting a crossroads of increasing diversity of needs, and calls for both cultural and technological redefinition. Her work explores what looks to be this impossible problem: how, if we are so entrapped within an ever-developing structure, are we capable of exploring alternatives outside of it?
Michael Manalo - Research Assistant
www.atelier-re.com
Michael Manalo, as of 2011, is a thesis candidate for the Media Design Program at Art Center College of Design. With a background in architecture and urban design, his current focus is fostering a practice that combines communication and graphic arts with space making and interaction design. Before coming to Art Center, Manalo has collaborated with Urban Operations Studio to create the Skyscraper Pamphlet series – a zine dedicated to future speculative programming of 20th century modern skyscrapers. Other collaborations have produced speculative works around specific issues of land uses for USG registered contaminated sites and developing memorials for Iraqi victims of the Iraqi-War conflict. These have been featured at WUHO (Woodbury University Hollywood Gallery), Sheppard Fine Arts Gallery, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts/Projects Space (New York, NY), and Works/San Jose.
Salvador Orara - Research Assistant
salvadororara.com
Salvador is a cross disciplinary designer born in LA and raised in New York City. His background is the alchemy of a Swiss/American design education, and a five-year professional stint with the recently defunct design atelier; The Map Office. His interests currently sit in the realm of sound, music, and noise. Where he explores new interfaces for musical expression, a new ecology of musical things, telematic instruments, designed animism, and tangible, embedded, screen/non-screen interfaces. Where he questions the boundaries of user experience, hybrid living, and design psychology, through conjecturable “narratives” embedded with or created by speculative objects, spaces, and media.
