Man: “…This dream was easily the best dream in the history of all dreams”.
A library assistant plods through an ordinary life in LA until a chance meeting opens his eyes to a the power of creativity and ultimately, love. When this new life and love begin to fall apart, he discovers he has a lot to give. This short film proves that ordinary is no place to be. (via IMDB)
View the trailer here…
I was reading some essays on Design Fiction by Julian Bleecker recently and was especially struck by this film after reading it. ‘I’m Here’ is such a perfectly imagined and made work of design-fiction in the sense that it makes you completely believe in the World which is created here. Not only are the ‘props’ and costumes entirely authentic, the fact that its set in the Almost Present makes the impact breathtakingly moving and simple. It focuses on human/robotic emotion while keeping the work of design very secondary.
This scene in the movie was such a brilliant piece of architectural fiction. It almost made me believe that such hospitals exist.
My moral from this story – A truly moving piece of design fiction is infinitesimally more valuable than a billion half-resolved design truths.
This will be the first time I watch my mentor and friend Mike Kruzeniski of Microsoft EXG Group present.
Usually my chats with him were on gchat and he would tell me to be less poetic! This is so cool to watch and learn from.
Building a new product is hard. In the transition from design to engineering, the subjective qualities of a product often lose out to practical challenges. This session is about an approach and framework that allowed us to sustain the aesthetic principles of an experience, by making emotional quality matter to our engineering team.
MIKE KRUZENISKI-MICROSOFT
Mike Kruzeniski is a UX Creative Director for the Entertainment Experience Group at Microsoft, in Seattle. Before joining Microsoft, Mike was a Designer on Nokia Design’s Insight & Innovation team in Los Angeles, where he worked on projects such as the Nokia 2010 View of the Future, and the concept design for the Nokia 8800 Arte. He has a Master’s of Interaction Design from the Umea Institute of Design in Sweden, and a Bachelor of Industrial Design form the Emily Carr Institute of Design in Vancouver, BC>
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Through a hands-on sketching process, Cottam explores ways of combining traditional design principles, craft techniques, natural materials, and physical computing tools to give modern products greater longevity and meaning.
MATT COTTAM-TELLART
Matt Cottam has been responsible for setting strategic direction for Tellart since co-founding the company in 1999. He provides both inspiration and direction through active involvement in client projects, academic research and teaching., as well as international design and technology conferences worldwide. With Tellart Matt has directed design and strategy projects for clients including Nokis Design, Humanna Inc. and Otis Elevator (United Technologies REsearch Center). Matt is a member of the part-time faculty at the Rhode Island school f Design and an Adjunct Professor at Umes Institute of Design (UID Sweden)>
Digital interactions are moving beyond keypad and screens and into sensing, networked products that inhabit our everyday lives. This session will explore how designers can create engaging experiences between physical products and digital services.
TIMO ARNALL
Timo Arnall is a designer working with interactive products and media. Timo leads an international research project on mobile technology. Timo’s work spans design, media and technology; interested in the ways in which products are used in everyday life, the emergent uses of new technologies and the design of products are used in everyday life, the emergent uses of new technologies and the design of products and services in local contexts and situations.
Even though I missed the 20th anniversary celebrations at Umeå I cannot but marvel at the amount of fun this event must have been for those who attended.
This video of a time-lapse, shot by Camille Moussette captures the spirit of the event brilliantly.
I believe in the concept of ubiquitous computing, as advocated by Adam Greenfield and many like-minded thinkers.
I believe that is the direction our future should take.
Honestly, I’ve done a project recently that uses urban and spatial elements and embedded computing to demonstrate a possible future. You touch a wall, and information appears. You move elsewhere, go home, and access that same data from your table surface. It’s all about moving away from the archetype of the desktop computer and disseminating the computer chip into many smaller ones that embed themselves in our clothes, our walls, homes and cities.
So I am partly shooting myself in the foot with this post. I want to rant about the frequent desire we have to project an augmented reality on our environments. Enough already! There has been a lot of talk in recent times about Pranav Mistry’s 6th Sense project. While I marvel at the genius of Pranav, and the sheer goodness of his intention – I politely and humbly refuse to believe that augmented reality is the way ahead. Wearing helmets to project our erstwhile computers onto walls so that our taped fingers can manipulate data on them, is not in my opinion, the dream for the future I had in mind. Pranav Mistry has clearly prototyped a way that could make augmented reality actually feasible – but I would shudder to think of a world where such a concept was commonplace.
So let me state again for the record – AUGMENTED REALITY IS NOT THE WAY AHEAD.
It is a dream for a future that we’ve had for a while now. We need to get over it, and think beyond.
Back at the start of the 14th Century, Giotto’s proof of his masterpiece was his free-hand circle. It was a concise way for him to demonstrate his enormous technical skill. Watching him draw the circle, it probably looked easy, but undoubtedly it took years, if not decades, of practice to get that kind of lazy, deft skill.
Jim Denevan makes freehand drawings in sand. At low tide on wide beaches Jim searches the shore for a wave tossed stick. After finding a good stick and composing himself in the near and far environment Jim draws– laboring up to 7 hours and walking as many as 30 miles. The resulting sand drawing is made entirely freehand w/ no measuring aids whatsoever. From the ground, these drawn environments are experienced as places. Places to explore and be, and to see relation and distance. For a time these tangible specific places exist in the indeterminate environment of ocean shore. From high above the marks are seen as isolated phenomena, much like clouds, rivers or buildings. Soon after Jim’s motions and marks are completed water moves over and through, leaving nothing.
(A project I recently completed at Ergonomidesign, along with some amazing team-mates).
The Future of Health Care is a subject that has been under intense speculation and debate in recent times across different forums. Several interesting prototypes and scenarios have been made by professionals and designers to give the World a glimpse of a fuzzy future.
For the first time ever, Ergonomidesign have made it possible to actually experience the future of Health Care. Following their launch at the Medica/ Compamed trade fair (in Düsseldorf, Germany, Nov. 18-20), Ergonomidesign will present and demonstrate a future life science application that brings together 40 years of design experience for Ergonomidesign in the Life Science industry. This video is one of 2, that give an overview of the entire concept.
Combining a fully functioning prototype with a well resolved service-ecosystem, Ergonomidesign will demonstrate vital segments of their vision “The Future of Integrated Health Care”. The application- “Helping Hands” (a Natural User Interface developed on a MS Surface table) will enable an experience that lets you manage your own health in the future. Their concept combines the benefits of ubiquitous computing with a merger of Health Care services with internet service providers. This merger would give rise to an exciting ‘ecosystem’, one that would bring cure to your doorstep or literally to the palm of your hand. Much like the mobile ‘app-world’, pharmacies would be able to sell a variety of healthcare devices containing embedded software that synchronized with relevant devices and your body automatically.
By the year 2015, vast amounts of personal data will constantly be uploaded in real-time to the “Cloud” – for others to use, share and benefit from. Through embedded sensors in our clothes, wrist watches, necklaces, shoes etc. it will be possible to constantly monitor our biometric data. These vast amounts of data pushed to the Cloud, would be made accessible to a network of ‘smart objects’ e.g. our mobile devices and our ‘smart’ homes, furniture and environments. Our biometric data will be accessible everywhere, constantly – to us and those who we have granted admission to (e.g. our doctors and family and relevant networks). The Cloud would also allow us constant access to contacts and services in a vast directory of doctors, fellow-patients and other daily health-care programs such as diet, exercise and prescription medicine. Your good health would now truly be based on the learning, benefits and experiences of others.
The experience envisioned by Ergonomidesign comprises lucid scenarios, personas and a working prototype that was developed by interaction designers, design strategists and graphic designers. Their challenge was to envision a complex future and develop user friendly, intuitive solutions for the World to understand and use. They have created an experience that combines intuitive gestural interactions with well-resolved service scenarios for the Health Care industry.
Sci-fi writer William Gibson famously quoted – “The Future is already here, it is just unevenly distributed.”(Neuromancer, 1984.) Most of the technology necessary to make our vision a reality is already here e.g. Nike+, LinkedIn, Facebook and the Apple ‘app-store’.
Ergonomidesign hopes that ‘Helping Hands’ will inspire thought and discussion about a World where staying in great shape and avoiding illness can actually be within reach.
I am an Interaction Designer based in Stockholm, Sweden. I'm working at Er-gono-mi-design these days, usual doing some awesome stuff. This blog is about exciting things, thoughts and events I happen to stumble upon. Sometimes, its a canvas for random experiments. More often, it'll be a museum of things, links, and nuggets of gold done by other people that I choose to preserve.
