Hasta La Ideas

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Fornasetti founder Piero Fornasetti (above). With a new wallpaper collection for Cole & Son coming out this month, we met up with Piero’s son, Barnaba Fornasetti (below), who told us the story behind the eccentric Italian design house that he now heads (+ interview + slideshow).

Marcus Fairs: Tell us about the collaboration with Cole & Son [see our previous story]. What is the thinking behind it?

Barnaba Fornasetti (pictured above): We decided to make a second collection for Cole & Son wallpaper. I was thinking of doing something a little more than a normal wallpaper, to give the opportunity to have something to stick on the wall with some more fantasy, to be more creative: applying the wallpaper in a different way so that is not only a wallpaper but is something more.

So I decided to do vertical rolls and horizontal rolls, and rolls that can be combined together. For example, we have the clouds that can be combined with balustrades and flying machines. You can choose to make only clouds with the balustrade or only a piece of the flying machine with clouds, or as this example of trompe-l’œil can put together a bookcase, an armoire, some objects and a trompe-l’œil wallpaper, and open windows and you can decorate a room without furniture. And you can also put a sky, if you want to put the wallpaper on the ceiling, you can make it. So, it’s a different way to use wallpaper.

Marcus Fairs: And these are all drawings that you’ve discovered in the archive of your father?

Barnaba Fornasetti: Yes, there are many themes that are taken from the archive. The archive is full of ideas that were used in different ways, mostly as decorations for objects like screens, umbrella stands and different accessories. So I chose things and I mixed them together, and I changed the colour, I changed the dimensions. There result I think is quite good.

Above: The “Palladiana” chest of drawers.

Marcus Fairs: Tell us a little bit about how your father started and how the Fornasetti brand grew.

Barnaba Fornasetti: He had a volcanic imagination. He woke up every morning with a different idea, and he would start to work on this idea with artisans and his employers, and he would forget what he was doing the day before. So it was very difficult to administer this imagination in an economical and sustainable way. When I received this heritage it was very difficult to continue, trying to channel it, trying to stop too much imagination and finding a way to be concrete in some way.

Marcus Fairs: How many drawings did he produce during his lifetime?

Barnaba Fornasetti: When I did the book [Fornasetti: The Complete Universe, published by Rizzoli in 2010, below] it was said that he had created about 11,000 different objects but we realised that it was more, probably about 13,000 different objects.

Marcus Fairs: And he drew all of these in his house, in your house, in Milan?

Barnaba Fornasetti: Yes in the house. There are many that are archived in the house, in storage; the attic is full of things. It is reduced now, but there is a lot of material there still.

Marcus Fairs: How would you describe your father’s style? He mostly worked in pen and ink, is that right?

Barnaba Fornasetti: Yeah the graphic drawing is the base of his ideas, his style, his culture. He was a photographic printer, printing for many other artists. He started as an artist and he became an expert in printing with different techniques. He used lithography for example to print on silk, so the first example of applied art by my father was the silk scarf, a headscarf in silk, printed with lithography and other techniques together. Fashion in some ways was one of the first experiences. He received the Neiman Marcus award [for Distinguished Service in the Field of Fashion] in 1959 in the field of fashion, not because he was a fashion designer but because a big inspiration in the field of fashion.

Above: Piero Fornasetti with the “Architettura” trumeau-bar

Marcus Fairs: Gio Ponti helped him establish Fornasetti as a brand. How did that come about?

Barnaba Fornasetti: They had this idea to combine industry with craft and art, to put decoration and art into everyday objects; to give the possibility for the wider public to have objects decorated especially with Italian art, with Surrealism. But industry doesn’t understand this kind of eccentricity, these kind of strange themes. So they didn’t get it and didn’t want to mass produce them. So he decided to start his own atelier and make a production that was selective, that was limited, not by choice but because it was difficult to produce industrially.

Marcus Fairs: And what was the role of Gio Ponti in that?

Barnaba Fornasetti: Gio Ponti was like a guru for my father. He was the guy who discovered the fantasy but not only the imagination of my father, but also the skill, the knowledge of techniques. He was able to invent technical ways to apply decoration to objects. The secret of Fornasetti is many artisans’ skills, many artisans’ secrets, put together, made by their ability to use their hands.

Above: The “Architettura” trumeau-bar by Piero Fornasetti. First exhibited in 1951.

Marcus Fairs: What was your father like to work with?

Barnaba Fornasetti: He was very egocentric, he was a very strong character and was difficult to collaborate with, especially at the beginning. I was a very hippy thinker and lazy, like all my generation at the time in the 60s. So I was frequently fighting with him. But a few years after moving away from home and finding my own job I saw he needed help and I came back. It was very interesting and a pleasure for both to be together.

Marcus Fairs: And he passed away in the late 80s?

Barnaba Fornasetti: 1988.

Above: “Zebra” Small curved cabinet by Barnaba Fornasetti. Wood. Printed, lacquered and painted by hand.

Marcus Fairs: How do you now balance the need to make a business with being true to your father’s ideas? What is the strategy of Fornasetti now?

Barnaba Fornasetti: The strategy is to continue in a way of making things not related to products, because I think we have too many products around us, there is too much production of things that we don’t need. I think we need food for the soul, imagination, decoration – because decoration is something that gives flavour to life, for the eyes and to stimulate vitality. It’s like music. Can you imagine a world without music? It would be sad, you know. Decoration is the same thing. We need decoration, I think. It’s something that we need for living better.

Marcus Fairs: And Fornasetti now licenses Piero’s designs to selected companies?

Barnaba Fornasetti: We have some licensing agreements in specific fields that are not the speciality of our company. We do furniture and china internally and also we do collaborations for wallpaper, scented candles, fabrics and other different things. I like collaborating with other designers that work in a particular field.

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– Barnaba Fornasetti on Piero Fornasetti appeared first on Dezeen.

The entrepreneurial spirit showed no signs of waning in 2012. From new generations breathing new life into faltered family brands to the birth of a Brooklyn surf shop, we welcomed the return of iconic brands and were introduced to some new ones as well. We love when strong brands have…

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Curator and writer Beatrice Galilee proposes that architecture and design exhibitions need to be about more than just “sticking furniture on plinths” in this movie we filmed at Dezeen Live during 100% Design. “It’s just not good enough anymore,” she says.

Contrasting this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale with the upcoming Lisbon Architecture Triennale she’s curating, Galilee explains why her approach avoids showcasing architectural models and products in favour of process and debate. “We’re not really interested in showcasing things that have happened, and we want to showcase things that will happen: people that will change the future of architecture, who’s going to be curating the next city and what’s that going to look like?”

This search for the next generation who will shape our world leads Galilee to work closely with critical designers who specialise in experiments and social commentary. “They don’t have an aim to be as part of a kind of manufacturing process but they would rather be involved in a discussion,” she explains.

Design with a critical agenda demands a critical response and Galilee stresses the need to uncover and nurture creative criticism. “There’s a real sense of urgency for a kind of more critical design and a kind of conversation about design,” she says.

By way of example, the talk begins with a discussion about the Hacked Lab exhibition that Galilee curated in Milan earlier this year (above), which comprised a series of events centred around new technologies and design experiments. “The idea of the week was to try and find different ways of presenting designers’ ideas and try to find things that are not just stuff on plinths,” she says. One of the activities involved designer Dominic Wilcox racing a 3D printer in a competition to build a model of the nearby Duomo cathedral.

She goes on to present a photograph taken in Africa (above), a place that she is currently researching, and explains how the narrative of African design is starting to focus on technology and particularly on science fiction. “Science fiction is quite an interesting way of designing in its own sense, city wise and landscapes and so on,” she explains.

The Black Book Interview Project, a series of events during the London Design Festival about the “urgent topic” of critical design is discussed next. “[The curators] were really trying to find out where critical design is, who’s writing it, who’s doing it, why isn’t there more of it?” says Galilee, before explaining how designers like Tuur Van Balen (above) are more interested in a “more social or anthropological or scientific kind of narrative”.

Broadening the topic to include architecture, Galilee discusses how this year’s biennale in Venice contained too many models presented as whole projects and not enough engagement with ideas. “Curators really should be sort of raising their game at this moment and be really trying to challenge audiences and to provide something interesting to say,” she adds.

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 and you can watch all the movies we’ve featured so far here.

The music featured in the movie is a track called Mosquito Maps by American designer and musician Glen Lib. Listen to more of his songs on Dezeen Music Project.

See all our stories about Beatrice Galilee »
See all our stories about Dezeen Live »
See all our stories about London Design Festival 2012 »

The post “There’s a real sense of urgency for a more
critical design” – Beatrice Galilee at Dezeen Live appeared first on Dezeen.

New Habitat creative director Polly Dickens has unveiled her first full collection, 18 months after the household furnishings chain went into administration and closed all but three of its UK stores (+ slideshow + interview).

In an interview with Dezeen, Dickens said she was taking the brand “back to what Habitat was many years ago in the original Conran days, when people thought about it as colourful, good design and something that had a very strong personality.”

Habitat, which was founded by Sir Terence Conran in 1964, was the first self-service, lifestyle-oriented design retailer, introducing UK shoppers to then-exotic continental staples like duvets and dried pasta.

However it ran into trouble in recent years and in June 2011 was rescued from administration by Home Retail Group, which closed all but three of the chain’s 30 UK stores. Dickens joined the group in January 2012.

“It had lost its way stylistically,” said Dickens, who was formerly Creative Director of The Conran Shop and has worked at retailers Anthropologie, Liberty and The Source. “It had become quite diluted and people didn’t really know what to expect from it any more.”

Under Dickens the brand is designing the majority of its products in house and is moving production back to Europe where possible. “We are specifically moving our upholstery back into the UK and we’re moving a lot of our manufacturing back into Europe; or at least out of China,” said Dickens. “That’s really important.”

See all our stories about Habitat.

Below is a transcript of the interview with Dickens (above) conducted by Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs:

Marcus Fairs: You joined Habitat as creative director at the start of the year and now your first full collection is about to hit the stores. What’s the thinking behind the collection?

Polly Dickens: We’ve really been thinking about colour, craftsmanship and the hand of the maker: pieces that really feel as if the hand has touched them, be they ceramics [above] or a beautiful piece of rattan [below].

We’re keeping our sense of humour and creating in everything strong, cultural shapes that are really easy to live with that function beautifully. That’s the general thinking. It’s really going back to what Habitat was many years ago in the original Conran days, when people thought about it as colourful, good design and something that had a very strong personality.

Marcus Fairs: How much of a departure is it from recent Habitat collections?

Polly Dickens: I think it’s got a more coherent handwriting. It’s come from a slightly different process. It’s a very collaborative process. The orientation is put together by me and the design team of six people. The buyers are very involved in the products at every stage. So I feel there’s a coherent handwriting that perhaps there wasn’t before. There’s a stronger feeling.

Of course it’s also about producing well-priced products. We’ve got a sofa that I’m passionate about: the Clarke [below], which is a really nice British-made sofa. The three-seat sofa is £750, the two-seater is £600. And it grows from a detail. It grows from these lovely chubby beech legs with the curved bottom. That detail goes through the whole sofa and pulls it together. And to cap it all, the fabric is nice and it’s extremely comfortable. So we’re trying to address things on all fronts.

And I’m steeped in Conran; I mean I’ve been a part of it all my life. It is about things that look beautiful but also things that work and that’s what [Habitat founder] Terence [Conran] would agree with.

Marcus Fairs: How can this collection help revitalise Habitat?

Polly Dickens: I think that because we’ve got an in-house design team – which is quite an unusual thing for a high-street retailer these days – we have an individuality. And we have experience in using materials in interesting ways, and in our use of colour, pattern and shape. I think that it’s the individuality of Habitat that you really cannot find anywhere else.

That’s what’s going to make it work, and the fact that we’re looking at out prices. Orrico, that beautiful silver beaten aluminium table [above], is £200. If you stand in front of that table it’s fantastic, it’s a beautiful piece of sculpture, it’s obviously been hand-made but it’s not expensive. I think that’s really important and that’s the message we need to get across.

Marcus Fairs: You mentioned that the sofa is made in the UK, but what about the rest of the products?

Polly Dickens: They’re made all over the place. We are specifically moving our upholstery back into the UK and we’re moving a lot of our manufacturing back into Europe; or at least out of China. That’s really important. So for example the Pedro tables [below] are made in a family-run factory in Poland and the tops are the most fantastic natural beech with an oil and wax finish, which is absolutely gorgeous and does really have a hand-finished feel.

So we’re moving things back to the Europe, moving things back to the UK where we can, but also exploring techniques in other parts of the world. My great passion has always been India, and a lot of textiles – rugs particularly – are coming out of India, and that’s where you can continue to experiment and to produce very special pieces.

Marcus Fairs: Are you aiming for a different type of customer?

Polly Dickens: Our customer profile is sort of 25-45 really. That’s the kind of age-group that we’re aiming at but I think with Habitat, as with the Conran shop, it’s not about your age – it’s about your state of mind really.

Marcus Fairs: What is that state of mind?

Polly Dickens: I think Habitat provides products that can mix in happily with what you already own. I feel like a lot of the products will mix in happily with other things, and that’s always been something about Habitat: you could always buy a piece of Habitat furniture and you could mix it in with the rest of what you own. When we’ve done customer research, that’s been a very important thing.

Marcus Fairs: What else did your customer research tell you? Did it help you understand why the brand got into trouble?

Polly Dickens: I’m creative director, so probably I’m not really the right person to answer that question. I just think that a lot of people had a hand in it and that it had lost its way stylistically. It had become quite diluted and people didn’t really know what to expect from it any more.

I think what we’re trying to do is to fulfil the expectation that it has got this strong character. That’s what I come back to: I think of Habitat almost as a personality. And I think it had got sort of woolly at the edges and the customer didn’t know what they were going to find when they went in there. Particularly latterly, when various other brands were introduced. That maybe confused people a bit.

Marcus Fairs: Is everything in the stores going to be designed in-house or will there be other products that you’ve sourced?

Polly Dickens: There are a few branded products that for one reason or another we can’t or won’t design for ourselves but [apart from those] every single piece of textile, every single piece of furniture, every single piece of lighting, every single piece of upholstery will be studio-designed.

Marcus Fairs: But the in-house design team isn’t new is it? Habitat always had a design team.

Polly Dickens: There has always been design team but it’s moved on in the last 12 months. The colour and pattern person who works with me is Rebecca Boyd. She teaches at Central St Martins and she’s been a designer in her own right for some years and she really has brought a very interesting handwriting to the table. Equally I have got an American designer, and Italian designer, a Japanese designer and a British designer at the moment so it’s a really interesting mixture of people.

Marcus Fairs: When will this collection hit the stores? When people visit the stores what differences will they notice about Habitat?

Polly Dickens: This collection will be in store at the end of February. I think that they’ll feel a coherence and a sense of colour and, for this particular collection, there’ll be also a strong feeling of craftsmanship.

Marcus Fairs: And is the way the stores are designed changing?

Polly Dickens: The way the stores look has changed quite a lot. Don’t go in now because the sale’s about to start but had you gone into the store on say King’s Road or Tottenham Court Road [both in London] in September, you would have seen quite a major difference.

The King’s Road is where you will see the most difference, because the ground floor has gone back to how it was originally which is all furniture, apart from the frame collection at the front. The kitchen department had been moved upstairs; we’ve now moved that back downstairs. It has a wonderful, open, spacious furniture floor, and then in the basement it has all the accessory products.

I don’t know if you remember the King’s Road but it was all much more mixed up and the customer journey was quite confused. There’s a real clarity about the store layout now in all our stores.

The other thing is windows. When Habitat was a 70-store business, windows were mass-produced capsule windows, because it was done at head office and could easily be rolled out across 70 stores. But now we’re a smaller business, our windows can be much more visually inspiring and grittier.

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“back to what it was many years ago” appeared first on Dezeen.

Smart glasses, wearable computers and skin-mounted sensors will soon guide people through airports and shops and allow them to pay for goods and services, according to John Hanke, the head of Google Maps (+ interview).

“I think the general idea is that the phone as an object kind of disappears,” said Hanke. “People are working on skin sensors and other ways of transmitting information to us in a way that’s passive and that doesn’t require us to divert our attention in the way that we do with the phone today.”

In an interview with Dezeen to mark the UK launch of Field Trip, Google’s new location-based publishing app, Hanke said: “When people pull out their phones and begin interacting with an application they’re basically pulling themselves into this bubble and putting up a wall between themselves and the real world around them. So it can take on this negative, anti-social aspect whenever you’re using smartphones and the internet.”

Hanke, who invented Google Earth and runs Google’s NianticLabs division, added: “We can use information technologies to enhance your experience with the real world without taking you out of the real world.”

Field Trip works out where you are and provides information about your location from a variety of websites, including Dezeen. Users browse text and images about nearby buildings, shops and services. Field Trip launched in the USA this autumn and will be rolled out to other countries next year.

Hanke predicted that location-based technology will soon allow people to navigate within buildings and make purchases. “Google has been working on this indoor location-mapping technology that allows you to get high-fidelity, high-accuracy location inside,” he said. “So that you can, for example, find your gate in an airport, or to find a specific aisle in a store, or to find a specific exhibit within a museum.”

Earlier this year Google unveiled Google Glass (top image), a concept for spectacles that display data. These could eventually allow users to find and pay for services such as cycle and car hire: “In the future the whole transaction could happen through Google Glass, payment and everything.”

Read more about Field Trip in our earlier story and see all our stories about Google.

Here is a transcript of the interview between Hanke (above) and Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs:

John Hanke: I’m John Hanke. I run a group called NianticLabs at Google, which is kind of a start-up exploring mapping and mobile technologies. For about six years before that I was the vice-president of product, in charge of Google Maps, Google Earth and Google Local.

Marcus Fairs: When did you join Google?

John Hanke: I was a CEO of a company called Keyhole that created the original Google Earth technology. We were acquired by Google in 2004. We came in and then relaunched our product as Google Earth.

Marcus Fairs: Tell us a little about that. How did it come about?

John Hanke: We started working on that around 2000. A lot of people had this vision of a map that would be this virtual globe that would have satellite imagery and would have these information layers available. We were inspired by science fiction. There’s an author named Neal Stephenson who had described a product like that in a book he wrote called Snow Crash. So there was this archetype, and it was just time for it to happen. The technology has finally made it possible to do it, so we wanted to see if we could make it real.

Marcus Fairs: There’s a very long history of maps, from people scratching lines on bits of bark through to the early maps of the world, but what difference did it make to people’s lives when they could zoom in on any point in the whole world? How did that change the way people thought about their lives and the planet they live on, as well as how they were going to get the next place?

John Hanke: I guess I would leave it to other people to draw the grand conclusions about what kind of an impact it’s made on the world. But I think it has to be a positive experience for people to be able to browse around the world and when you look at a country, to be able to zoom in and see that it looks a lot like the place that you live.

You know, when you explore China you’re not zooming into a big red polygon, you’re seeing houses and cities and a landscape that you can relate to. I mean, I think there has to be an underlying positive impact on the world for people to have that experience or exploring and seeing similarities.

Marcus Fairs: And in terms of that kind of technology, how detailed can it get? Can it get to the point where you can zoom in and figure out if your friends are in the cafe already? How much real-time data can that kind of technology provide?

John Hanke: Well as you probably know, Google is now doing indoor mapping and indoor Street View so that you can go from space to a city to the street to the inside of a cafe or restaurant and experience what it’s like inside. And you have all of these kind of real-time technologies for knowing about what’s going on, where your friends are, so I think we’re getting closer to that idea that you can know what’s happening at any place on the world at any time. It’s not fully realised yet, but we’re getting there.

Marcus Fairs: A problem with digital maps, apps and social media is that if you’re looking at your phone you’re not looking at where you are. You’re not concentrating on your route and you’re not enjoying the city, your friends, your family.

John Hanke: Yes and that’s the area that my new group is working on. Some people call this augmented reality, some people talk about ubiquitous computing, but the gist of the idea is that we can use information technologies to enhance your experience with the real world without taking you out of the real world.

People have written about this problem of the information bubble. When people pull out their phones and begin interacting with an application they’re basically pulling themselves into this bubble and putting up a wall between themselves and the real world around them. So it can take on this negative, anti-social aspect whenever you’re using smartphones and the internet.

So we would like to explore this frontier of providing information that enriches your life and your experience of the real world, but does it seamlessly by working in the background and by sequencing that information automatically.

So we launched this application called Field Trip in the US about a month ago that does that. It looks in the background for interesting things around you. We work with publisher partners who make their feeds available within that product and it tells you about cool stuff that’s nearby without you having to pull out your phone and press buttons on a UI. It all happens in the background.

Marcus Fairs: Why did you invite Dezeen on board?

John Hanke: Well I’m a huge fan of Dezeen and its great coverage of global design community, and we’re delighted to be working with you.

Marcus Fairs: How will our content be useful to someone who’s interested in architecture or design?

John Hanke: The notion is that I can take a stroll through the streets of London and the application will automatically surface a card. Or if I had a headset connected it can actually read that information to me. If I’m walking by a place that Dezeen has written about – it might be a piece of architecture or it might be a really cool local shop, it might be a great coffee shop, or some other piece of design – it will tell me about that without me having to constantly be doing searches or interrogating an app.

Marcus Fairs: How precise is the mapping technology? Could you use it to navigate around a room or does it only really work on the scale of a block or a street?

John Hanke: For what we’re doing with Field Trip right now the accuracy is tens of metres, so it’s really designed for use outdoors. We would love to have it work indoors. The location technology is really just now getting good enough to do that. The problem historically has been that GPS doesn’t penetrate indoors, so you don’t get that very high quality precision location inside of a building. You have to fall back to something like wifi-based location when you’re indoors, which tends not to be accurate.

But Google has been working on this indoor location-mapping technology that allows you to get high-fidelity, high-accuracy location inside, so that you can, for example, find your gate in an airport, or to find a specific aisle in a store, or to find a specific exhibit within a museum.

We have to do additional work to go out and map those locations to get that high-precision indoor mapping, and we’re just starting to do that.

Marcus Fairs: Will people be able to find stories from Dezeen’s archive? At the moment people tend to consume the latest stories on the site, but we’ve got years of archived stuff about buildings around the world.

John Hanke: Yeah that’s the reason I’m really excited about it. These stories that have been written over the years may not be viewed as much. But when you’re out moving through the world, when one of those stories is about a place that’s near you, it’s incredibly useful and relevant. So we want to help people discover that.

Marcus Fairs: How will Field Trip work? You download the app and tell it what they’re particularly interested in, and then the information just pops up as you navigate the city?

John Hanke: Yes. You configure Field Trip before you start the application for the first time and select the feeds that you want. There are different categories that you can select from. Then as you move around through the physical world, information from those publishers about something that is nearby automatically pops up on your phone.

Marcus Fairs: And does it work around the whole world?

John Hanke: It works around the whole world, but so far we’ve only released the application for the United States. We’re waiting in each country until we have sufficient coverage with partners before we officially launch it. The next one up for us will be the UK.

Marcus Fairs: How else can location-based services change the way we interact with real places?

John Hanke: That’s a big question. There’s a wealth of information available on the internet that makes our lives better but whenever we’re out, moving around through the real world, even though that information is there and theoretically accessible, it’s actually so tedious and time-consuming and awkward to go and retrieve that information or use those services, that we don’t. So effectively, we’re not really getting the full benefit of what’s already available on the web when we’re out moving about in the physical world.

So if we could figure out better user interfaces, where you have agents that work in the background that surface this information to us automatically, I think we can see enhancements in many areas.

Marcus Fairs: How will this information be consumed? Will we have heads-up displays on the inside of our sunglasses?

John Hanke: I think the general idea is that the phone as an object kind of disappears. People talk about wearable computing: we might have audio devices; we might have something like Google Glass. People are working on skin sensors and other ways of transmitting information to us in a way that’s passive and that doesn’t require us to divert our attention in the way that we do with the phone today.

Marcus Fairs: How do skin sensors work?

John Hanke: Researchers are working with things that are fixed to the skin; and sensations can be transmitted that way. That’s one of the more far out types of technologies. Things like the Google Glass can paint information into your field of view about what’s around you, but the idea is that all of these are a way of getting information to you that allows you to remain in the context of what you’re doing without interrupting that.

Marcus Fairs: So the phone is really a transitory bit of technology. It’s sort of between the computer and something that’s part of your clothing or your skin even?

John Hanke: I think that’s true, yes. I think the phone as the single way that you’re benefitting from information technology probably will evolve into something that looks a lot different from that and isn’t the singular artifact that you obsess over and spend all your time interacting with. I think the idea is that it sort of fades into the background and that these other mechanisms are providing the information to you.

Marcus Fairs: So you’re passively receiving information about what’s around you, but how can technology help you interact with the city?

John Hanke: There’s no reason why many of the things that we interact with today can’t have a digital interface to them. So a building or a commercial service can benefit from having a digital UI that’s telling you about it and allowing you to make a transition or allowing you to interact with it.

Marcus Fairs: Can you give an example of something like that?

John Hanke: Well anything that has a physical UI today may be much more useful and enriched with a digital one. Bike sharing would be one example. How much richer could the act of renting a bike be if it was happening through this digital interface and was projecting into something like Google Glass? I could see the bikes, I could see the road network, I could understand availability across the city. In the future the whole transaction could happen through Google Glass, payment and everything. Just imagine a digital interface to the world around you.

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