Hasta La Ideas

We’ve landed in Cape Town, 2014 World Design Capital, for this year’s Design Indaba Conference, which kicks off today with the likes of Experimental Jetset, Jake Barton and Thomas Heatherwick, to name a few (and that’s just on day one!) and will continue through the rest of the week and weekend with the Expo. Stay tuned for reporting live from South Africa, but in the meantime you can check out Daniel Charny‘s presentation from last year, in which he covers the “Power of Making” exhibition at the V&A to a more recent project called Fixperts.

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With this year’s Design Indaba Conference kicking off in two days, we’ve been catching up on some of last year’s talks. As always, the organizers have done a great job bringing together an inspired and inspiring mix of artists and designers. A talk by Berlin-based artist and illustrator Christoph Niemann is perhaps the perfect example, and we can’t recommend it highly enough. The trailer barely does it justice:

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What can Interaction Designers learn from other disciplines? At Interaction14, many speakers challenged the community to look at Art, Architecture, Industrial Design, Graphic Design and Animation as a lens for Interaction Design.

Gillian Crampton Smith, Head of the Interaction Design program at University of Venice, questioned if there is a language of interaction design. She shared the ways in which Art and Architecture have distinct languages that can be understood across many cultures. However, Interaction Design lacks the same universally understood common language. Smith mentions the word “design” as being problematic and shared examples of how it is translated and understood in other cultures and languages such as English, French and Italian. Smith discussed the functional limitations of interaction design and how humans interact with computers as proof that we still have a long way to go in defining the language of Interaction Design.

Antonio De Pasquale included this video in his presentation; more on that below

Scott McCloud shared the many ways in which visual storytelling is used and how we are narrative-seeking creatures. He talked about how people create meaning on the fly through visual stimuli. McCloud was very poetic in the way he schooled us on visual storytelling and talked about our medium not being paper and pencils, but instead the knowledge and expectation of our users. He challenged us to think outside of the box, or the screen in this case, and consider how we can guide a user through a story digitally in a non-linear way.

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It’s a brisk 40 degrees here in Amsterdam as I opt to take a cab instead of walk to the Westergasfabriek, where Interaction14 is being held. The cab pulls up and I am amazed at the beautiful complex chosen for hosting the conference this year. Locals are out for their morning jog with their dog and children along the canal front. As I continued to walk towards the main building for the conference, I took in the scenery of local restaurants, galleries and studios.

The Interaction14 planning committee did an amazing job curating every last detail from the venue space, stage setup and food to make sure attendees experienced the essence of Amsterdam. When I arrived at the venue, local student volunteers eager to provide assistance and kick off the conference greeted me. I continued on to explore the space which had a welcoming vibe filled with couches, picnic tables, DIY nespresso coffee and local goodies from the Netherlands. The stage setups consisted of faux building facades and bicycles, which was a wonderful touch to the presentations.

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Reporting by Chris Beatty; photography by Jessica Miller unless otherwise noted

Last Friday at Parsons the New School for Design, Derek Porter, Director of the School’s Lighting Design Program, and Matthew Cobham of Philips brought together a diverse group of researchers, architects, and lighting designers to discuss the nuanced juncture between natural and man-made lighting.

“Luminous Talks: Nature and Man-Made” kicked off with a look at research into the fundamentals of light perception, presented by Dr. Raymond Van Ee, a professor of neurology and a research fellow at Philips whose work examines the importance of light in creating the optimal conditions for maintaining attention.

Clockwise from top left: Matthew Cobham; Raymond Van Ee; Davidson Norris; George Craford

Next, we heard from George Craford, an early pioneer of LED lighting technology who worked with Nick Holonyak to bring LED’s from industrial switchboards to car headlights, a feat once described as impossible by the Wall Street Journal. Craford explained that while ‘a photon is still a photon’ no matter where it comes from, there are a couple of key ways to quantify the quality of light. The main system in use today is the Color Rendering Index (CRI) which measures the reflection of a light source as it bounces off 15 unique color chips. The CRI of an incandescent light bulb is a shown by broad curve which reaches its peak with the reflection of yellow light. The CRI of fluorescent lighting is spiked with multiple peaks, its phosphors were actually engineered maximize its results on this score.

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