MUSCLE is a class broadly explores the relationships between the body, movement and technology. Though conceptually focused, students will perform research-in-practice through movement exercises, small, weekly experiments that take the form of sketches, diagrams, videos, and conceptual prototypes. Students interested in digital performance, physical computing, computer vision and motion tracking will leave the class with a broad foundation in movement and conceptual methods and development for future projects and application. Prior to the industrial revolution, the body was the primary tool for transforming the world. Over the past 150 years, the body’s capacities and capabilities have been increasingly outsourced to machinery, appliances, and devices, and distilled to eyes, ears, and fingertips. This course examines the gap between the innate capacities of the body and what technology asks of it to uncover a broader spectrum of future possibilities. The course will present the basics of movement from anatomical historical and social perspectives, and survey different modalities and languages of movement. We will examine the history of movement in industrial design and the physical choreography of tools, and the history of physical interaction with digital technologies. We will engage with ideas of interface, affordance, body schema and choreography to marry movement, meaning, and device in new and experimental ways. This class is meant to be a beginning of expanded practices and new approaches to future relationships between the body and technology. We will end it with the beginning—a proposal—for a future project.
Remember those rubbish bins that looked like happy frogs, to entice children to have fun feeding it with their trash? Well, KesselsKramer has tried entirely the opposite approach with its campaign for Koning Willem I College in The Netherlands. Through a series of ludicrous rubbish bins, the Amsterdam-based agency has made it really difficult for students to discard their litter, challenging their competitive sides.
[Note for Tomdispatch readers: With this post, I'm following so many of you offline for the year. I thank each of you who hung in there with TD through 2006. Have a recuperative holiday season. Let's hope for a distinctly better 2007. You can count on TD returning early in the New...
Looking back at the near future from the distant future written in the past. Rebecca Solnit nails it again.
[image] In Bookforum, Eric Banks reviews the book Track Changes by Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, a history of word processing, from the 1964 introduction of IBM's Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter to the present. In his review, Banks reflects on not just the technical aspects of each successive writing machine, but on how they shaped the writing process, especially for fiction writers. An excerpt: What made word-processing devices much more than just souped-up typewriters was not only that they ...
We've all seen exaggerated depictions of kung fu in movies or maybe a demonstration by a practitioner in real life, but German digital artist Tobias Gremmler decided to portray the Chinese martial art in an entirely new light through the use of motion capture. By capturing the motion of diffe
To be honest, this is a really difficult post to write. When I initially read Speculative Everything and Hertzian Tales I thought there was a small piece of my brain that understand what I was reading and how Dunne and Raby’s designs and prototypes are examples of speculative design. If I hadn’t had any context I would just assume they were weird art projects with no meaning. Why would people go through such depth analysis to explore these insane prototypes they built just to make people ask questions. I kind of left this block of confusion to rest inside of my brain. And throughout class, I had a moment where I actually felt like I saw a lightbulb turn on and I got it. I understood speculative design, especially in relation to Muscle.Â
My thought was that are all of these products and experiences were designed for us years and years ago before it was even sure that they would technologically be possible. And what they proved to do was eliminate so much movement in everyday choreography that it became detrimental. So people are frantically trying to redesign the future of our choreography through product and experience designs in the hope that we don’t end up like those people from Wall-E. And even when I said this, I wasn’t even sure what I said.
But then we had our class when we were given future situations where things like chips embedded in our brains to increase to a super-human intelligence was the norm. And through physically acting through that, things became a little clearer. And then there was the class when we learned about the Grotewski method and acted like spastic cats doing a yoga flow and things became a little clearer. And then I worked on our final project where I proposed there would be a universal gestural language that would enable people to communicate via holographic lenses in a world where there were no devices. And this process started having me ask questions.
Speculative design is something I know think about every day. I have been thinking about it since I was working on my final project until this very moment I am writing this. To the point where I was watching anime with my partner, who was explaining the complicated plot of a tv show called “Tokyo Ghoul”--usually when he is watching an Anime show and he begins to tell me the plot, I either lose interest because its complexity, or  feel unsure of what I should even as to understand the multiple layers of the plot. But this time was different, I was asking question after question...”what does it mean for this...?” “what do people do if this...?” or “are the ghouls the manifestation of people today?”. We chatted about the show for awhile and then I said rather confidently, “Anime is like speculative design” and without taking another breath, he responded, “Yes, exactly.”
Writing this retrospectively, Alex Todaro’s presentation was still a game-changer for me. I think this was the class that changed my perspective of design and opened the first door of understanding design in a different perspective. I loved learning about his ideas and fascination with interfaces. I also loved that some of the ladies challenged him when he showed the first interface to be a baby feeding from a woman’s breast. The idea of having that be known to be the first interface makes me begin to question how we all move through the world in a greater scope. For example, if a baby feeding from a breast isn’t as intuitive to everyone as being our first interface, does that have any connection on how we understand and communicate in our lives. Is there a ground that is common in design? I started this class believing that you are designer or  you’re not a designer—that there are certain softwares you must know in order to be a designer and certain colors that only designers understand to be beautiful or ugly. I hadn’t thought of thinking like a designer.
Alex Todaro’s thesis on tables as an interface was truly fascinating to me. I realized that I was so wrapped up in the technical aspects of what we are learning at ITP that I was missing is how we actually interact with things. Everyday things. Relating this to Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things, when objects are designed meaningfully their interaction is intuitive the user. So intuitive that we are in some ways taken out of thinking about how to interact and have the opportunity to just focus on the interaction, meaning they get more out of the experience.
This class was great as it gave light to the previous reading in Speculative Everything. I think many of us came to class feeling a little unsure of our understanding of Speculative Design. I definitely felt that the in-class activity helped me with clarification and gave me more ideas into how Speculative Design works.Â
I worked with Jordan and Ella about a future scenario where there would be a chip embedded into our brains when a child turns 13. That chip will give us unlimited intelligence. As always in this class, I loved to perform. I truly believe that’s opened a new door of understanding new materials.Â
I think the biggest take away from Speculative Design is when you start asking questions, then you know it’s working. Then you know that you’re on the way of designing something in the future. For example, with our presentation, I wondered how a relationship between parents would be if a child has limited intelligence until they are 13 years old. What would this mean for how we learn and obtain new information?
Patent language for possible Nintendo hand-held gaming device
File listing one: “A non-transitory storage medium encoded with a computer readable image processing program is provided. The image processing program causes a computer to perform functionality including obtaining an infrared image of a subject and determining a position of the subject included in the infrared image based on brightness and a size of a prescribed region of the subject within the infrared image.”
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