Hasta La Ideas

Milan 2014: futurist and writer Bruce Sterling was among this week’s visitors to the FOMObile in Milan – the first mobile press room for an algorithmic publishing experiment led by Joseph Grima (+ download).

Sterling’s comment on events being “the new magazines” became one of the guiding principles for the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) project, which centres around a piece of software that combines voice recognition and data from social media to produce an instant newspaper.

“The project was born from the idea of publishing not being compatible with such a timeframe [as Milan design week]; asking how it can embrace this notion of the event, as Bruce Sterling stated,” said Grima, whose design research collaborative Space Caviar developed FOMO.

“If events are the thing that now drives contemporary production, we need to find a way for publishing to adapt to that condition, to explore a way to create an instant record,” he said.

FOMO had its debut in Milan this with a series of evening talks from leading designers called On The Fly. Taking place underneath Nike’s Aero-static dome at Palazzo Clerici, the presentations tackled themes including weightlessness and sustainability in design. Speakers included Atelier Bow Wow, Clemens Weisshaar, Martino Gamper and Formafantasma.

Their words were combined with social activity trawled from the #ontheflymilan hashtag, including Instagram pictures and Tweets, which were put together by the algorithmic publishing machine into a PDF, printed and bound, and handed out for free to visitors at Palazzo Clerici.

You can now download issues four to eight of FOMO from day two of the experiment, with contributions from Italo Rota, Ianthe Roach and Pier Nucelo on the theme seamlessness.

» Olympia Zagnoli – download here
» Italo Rota – download here
» Pier Nucleo – download here
» Marco Raino – download here
» Ianthe Roach – download here

Download the previous issues of FOMO featuring Atelier Bow Wow, Clemens Wiesshaar, Studio Folder, Marco Ferrari and Elisa Pasqual here.

The final issues of FOMO from Milan will be available on Dezeen next week.

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Milan newspaper FOMO appeared first on Dezeen.

News: don’t let fear mongers prevent the development of technologies that make the human body perform better and last longer, says a leading bio-ethicist.

A “conservative, dystopian version of the future” is holding back the development of cyborg technology and the genetic modification of humans, said Andy Miah, chair of ethics and emerging technologies and director of the Creative Futures Institute at the University of the West of Scotland.

Speaking at the Bye Bye Homo Sapiens symposium, hosted by Central Saint Martins department of Materials Futures, Miah compared the evolution of bio-tech to modern medicine where interventions like pacemakers have become an accepted norm.

“We need to think of our bodies as works in progress: as things which can benefit from bio-technological modification,” he said.

“I would argue that our commitment to longevity in life commits us inevitably to human enhancement.”

Miah cited laser eye surgery as an example of a technology that was initially mistrusted but is now widely used to improve patient’s eyesight.

Similarly, resistance to growing body parts from stem cells or using nanotechnology to introduce disease-fighting cells into the body needs to be overcome, said Miah.

Acceptance of bio-technology techniques will accelerate, he said, once people become accustomed to seeing how they can be used to improve patient’s lives by design.

Discussions around human enhancement quickly become fraught and contentious, because “at the heart is the debate about what kind of life is worth living”, he said.

“The concern is that there is a loss of self that we encounter by embracing the technology… Either through behaviours or through biological transgressions, people perceive a compromise of identity. The concern is that if we do this, we somehow lose some part of our humanity.”

He pointed to the world of sports where doping scandals are rife, but athletes are already using technology to enhance their performance through their equipment and clothing. Improving the human body – or even opening the door to possibilities like cryogenic suspension  – is the next step.

Miah has previously been involved in a UK government select committee on human enhancement technologies in sport.

His current undertakings include a major collaborative project on the ethics and politics of biomedical developments for human enhancement led by the Universities of Madrid and Granada.

“There’s a tendency to characterise people interested in these forms of human enhancement as being somehow radical others: that they are transgressing the norms of humanity, that they are challenging the human species by advocating that we ought to move beyond it,” said Miah.

“It’s a red herring to believe that these desires to reinforce ourselves or to extend the upper limits of our capacities [are somehow transgressive]: whether that’s the length of our life or the length of our limbs”.

“Our concerns about biological transgressions are something that we will relegate to history in due course.”

The post “We need to think of our bodies
as works in progress” appeared first on Dezeen.

Advertorial Content: As the days tick away until this year’s Milan Design Week, running 9-13 April 2013, we’re looking forward to our Designer Master Classes and a slew of other design events to be held at );…

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Interiors and products will need more tactile designs as the use of computers and screens makes us crave a sense of touch, trend forecaster Li Edelkoort predicts in this last movie filmed at Dezeen Live.

“The more screens we have the more our figures are afraid we’re going to disappear,” she says. “I feel it already in my fingers that they want me to touch lots of things so I don’t loose contact with touch.” Edelkoort therefore predicts that textiles will be increasingly important in interior design, supporting the increasingly nomadic lifestyle that mobile technology permits.

“You can be in the middle of the desert and people will think you’re in New York,” she says, “So you become anonymous and you don’t care anymore where you are. I think that sort of freedom which is going to be created will make us want to have lots of textiles, lots of rugs, we will have portable tables, portable sinks, portable lights like lanterns.”

This nomadic attitude could also alter our social relationships, she suggests. “This liberty we have now in work and play will reflect also in the other parts of life, so eating, sleeping, entertaining, we would be more nomadic about that, not always sitting at the same table with the same partner.”

Edelkoort proposes grandparents and grandchildren as “the new couple of the future,” as people live longer and choose more freely who to spend their time with. She thinks that “individualism is over and so people care much more about family, even if it’s chosen family and friends,” leading to a more compassionate society. “It’s all about a society which is, let’s say, softer, more rounded, more textured.”

Above: image by Michael Baumgarten

Edelkoort begins the talk with an image showing the hands of a child and elderly person. “There is a falling away of the generation gap, whereas grandparents are very young and young children are very old,” she says. “They hang out together for a while… it means that you can be a baby your whole life, or you can be already old even when you’re born. I think that age is now going to be more of a mental thing than a physical thing actually.”

Above: felt cushion by Peta Lee and designs by Coral Stephens

The next image represents nomadism and shows textiles with portable furniture. “We have all our devices we can work and stay wherever we want,” says Edelkoort. “This new feeling of freedom, which is fairly recent, is only now starting to modify the brain I believe.”

Above: Mine Kafon by Massoud Hassani

Her third image shows Massoud Hassani’s device for seeking and destroying landmines, based on a wind-powered toy and made of bamboo and plastic components. “It’s a mine killer, but its completely organic and very cheap,” Edelkoort says, adding “it’s very beautiful how a childhood toy can become now such an amazing device.”

Above: Teresa Toys by DMOCH

Next is a set of building blocks for children comprising rounded wooden pieces and small leather balls. “This is to teach babies how to feel form and how to create buildings and skylines, and it’s like soft toys instead of the square toys,” she explains. “Of course, already the babies have their screens so this is to counterbalance the screens.”

Above: photo by Thomas Straub for Madé for View on Colour

The final image shows a mask incorporating bones and introduces the 2013 Arnhem fashion biennial (MoBa 13) that Edelkoort is curating on the theme of fetishism. “There is a moment in fashion where there is this super need to be very fetishistic. There is animalism, there is children’s behaviors, there is of course bondage, there is lace, there is fur, feathers and so on,” she explains. “I’m going to investigate why.”

Edelkoort concludes with the idea that “trend forecasting is like archeology but to the future”, explaining how she looks for little fragments in current culture to predict what’s coming next.

Dezeen Live was a series of discussions between Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs and a number of designers and critics that took place at design exhibition 100% Design during London Design Festival this September.

Each of the four one-hour shows, recorded live in front of an audience, included three interviews plus music from Dezeen Music Project featuring a new act each day. We’ve been posting all the movies we filmed on Dezeen and you can watch all the movies from Dezeen Live here.

The music featured in the movie is a track called Business Class Refugees by Indian record label EarthSync. Listen to more of their songs on Dezeen Music Project.

See all our stories about Li Edelkoort »
See all our stories about Dezeen Live »
See all our stories about London Design Festival 2012 »

The post “Super technology is going to ask for super
tactility” – Li Edelkoort at Dezeen Live appeared first on Dezeen.

In the next movie we filmed during Dezeen Live at 100% Design, designer Asif Khan explains how soap bubbles, rubbish bins and a neighbour’s flower bed have all provided inspiration for his work.

Above: images from Asif Khan and David Knight’s blog

Khan begins by showing the first of five images, a composite of pictures including amusing signage at an east London market and a vapour trail from a u-turning plane, posted onto the blog he shares with designer and author David Knight. “It started as a place where we could post images for each other to look at,” Khan explains. ”It’s a pot where I harvest ideas from quite often.”

As an example of using his vicinity as stimulus, he describes how while struggling to come up with an idea for his 2010 residency at London’s Design Museum he used a plant growing on the route to his studio as inspiration for his Harvest furniture collection. “It was staring me in the face, this thing, so I thought why don’t I ask the lady who owns the garden if I can take a bit of this and see what we can make from it.”

Above: gypsophilia plant (left) and a table from the Harvest furniture collection

He proceeds to recount the instance he began to think of architectural applications for soap bubbles while bathing his children. “Why can’t we make a wall out of a material like this which you could sculpt? Why can’t it be a roof? What would it mean?” This lead to experiments with helium and soap to create floating cloud-like forms, as shown in his next pair of images.

Khan then shows the Coca-Cola Beatbox pavilion at the London 2012 Olympic park that he designed with Pernilla Ohrstedt, which has elements that play sounds of performing athletes recorded by music producer Mark Ronson.

Above: clouds (left) and an experiment with helium and soap bubbles (right)

He finishes by showing his design for this year’s Designers in Residence exhibition, inspired by fabrics used to keep flies away from rubbish in Tokyo. “You can see the impression that the cardboard boxes have left on the fabric; it’s got this memory. We used a fabric quite similar to this with electrical conductivity to form booths around each designer’s work.”

“I’m interested in new ways of doing things and the future of what the space around us might look like,” he concludes.

Above: a journey (left) and the Coca-Cola Beatbox pavilion at the Olympic Park (right)

Dezeen Live was a series of discussions between Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs and a number of designers and critics that took place as part of the talks programme at design exhibition 100% Design during this year’s London Design Festival.

Each of the four one-hour shows, recorded live in front of an audience, included three interviews plus music from Dezeen Music Project featuring a new act each day. Over the next few weeks we’ll be posting all the movies we filmed during the talks.

Above: netting used to keep flies from bins (left) and this year’s Designers in Residence exhibition at London’s Design Museum (right)

Movies we’ve already published from the series include talks with IDEO UK design director Tom Hulme, architect and writer Sam Jacob and designer Katrin Olina.

The music featured in this movie is a track called Snotty by Reset Robot. You can listen to more music by Reset Robot on Dezeen Music Project.

See all our stories about Asif Khan »
See all our stories about Dezeen Live »
See all our stories about London Design Festival 2012 »

The post “I’m interested in what the future might
look like” – Asif Khan at Dezeen Live appeared first on Dezeen.