Royal College of Art workshop next Tuesday

Next Tuesday Jürg Lehni and Stewart are conducting a workshop for Sara De Bondt’s masters class at the Royal College of Art in London. The pair will introduce themselves and talk a bit about their separate practices before giving a design brief to the students. The results of this brief will be examined the following Tuesday.

Ides of December

A rather good day to pause and review. In November Robert Gerard Pietrusko and Stewart unveiled their latest collaboration, Under Vine, for the SFMOMA’s new exhibition How Wine Became Modern: Design + Wine 1976 to Now. Under Vine is a data animation describing a modernized view of wine production and export.

Last week Jürg Lehni and Stewart visited Sara De Bondt’s Design Without Labels class at the Royal College of Art to conduct a workshop. The two gave a “subjective and fragmented” history of programming (beginning with punch card looms and largely avoiding actual computer languages all together) and then delivered an assignment brief challenging the students to create their own language and example applications for the following week. More after the jump…

ÉCAL design workshop

Next week I’ll be conducting a workshop for students in the Media and Interaction Design department at the University of Art and Design, Lausanne (ÉCAL) in Lausanne, Switzerland. —Stewart

Pleased to meet you ÉCAL

Last week was “workshop week” at the University of Art and Design, Lausanne (ÉCAL). Selected practitioners from various fields within art and design were invited to the school to conduct five day workshops with the students. Stewart was invited to work with the Media & Interaction Design students and posed to them the following group-based assignment: 1. Design a language or system that accepts input and transforms it into a new output. 2. Select ‘found’ inputs to be processed by the system. 3. Design an input that hacks and extends the original design of the system. (No actual programming required, though of course some groups did choose this route.) Special thanks to assistant Mathieu Rudaz for his help and insights during the week and to Jürg Lehni who collaborated on an earlier form of this experiment—challenging design students to imagine new languages of design. And finally, a very warm thank-you to the ÉCAL faculty and staff who were incredibly generous hosts. Below are brief descriptions of the students’ final results. More after the jump…

X-Files: Trust No One

This year the Royal College of Art’s catalog for graduating Communication Art & Design (CAAD) students was composed of responses to three different conversation prompts. (See catalog for full descriptions: Fact and fiction in a digital context; The value of things—Material artefacts in a digital world; New models for publishing.) Respondents to these prompts included students, RCA staff and external designers, critics, architects and artists. And of course, your humble, X-Files obsessed narrator—having previously participated as a visiting critic for the How-to How-to workshop and the Blackberry workshop. And so this strange little X-Files tribute series has now spun off a small printed piece entitled Trust No One. The beautifully designed catalog is of course full of CAAD creativity and if you have the opportunity to acquire one (or better yet, meet with the graduating CAAD students) I strongly suggest that you do. —Stewart

Goodbye 2011

The year is at its end—a moment to reflect upon twelve months of experiments, achievements, and blunders. 2011 opened with multiple trips to Karlsruhe, Germany to collaborate with the ZKM Center for Art and Media on a very early version of trans_actions. In February Stewart served on the judging panel for TED’s Ads Worth Spreading competition and tutoring a month long workshop at the RCA with Jürg Lehni. April was packed: More visits to ZKM, the Creativity and Technology conference posted my Code Play lecture video, Paola Antonelli wrote an article for Domus about data visualization that used Exit as an example, and I posted some odd X-Files triptychs. More after the jump…

AIGA BoNE Show 2013

I’m excited to be on the jury panel for this year’s AIGA Best of New England (BoNE) Show biennial design competition alongside Elliott Earls and Lucille Tenazas. The three of us will be milling about—drinks in hand?—for the casual Meet the Judges event this Friday evening. We’ll talk a bit and perhaps even have some fancy objects to share. (So do come down and say hello.) It’s the BoNE Show’s 10th anniversary, after all.

For an added slice of sunshine I’ll be at Boston University meeting with design students in some capacity for the majority of Friday morning and afternoon. You can hit me up with questions (or disenchanted meanderings) via Twitter: @stewd_io. Non sequiturs—if you were curious, this is what Google Glass feels like. And finally, today is Kurt Cobain’s 46th wouldn’t you know.