Dissertation: DONE

Title - Scalar Ways of Seeing: Perspectives on Perspective.

Inspired by Charles and Ray Eames' Powers of Ten I was interested in how advances in technology have given us new ways of seeing ourselves for example the invention of flight allowed us to see our cities from above for the first time and spaceflight brought with it images of the whole earth. Also, the significance of vertical perspective and viewing things at different scales. I analysed the new types of media that came with these new technologies and how they reflected on socio-political issues of their time. I concluded by debating whether currently we have focused our attention on a microscopic perspective and all of our investigations into events on a micro scale e.g nanotechnology, human behaviour at a neuro level and synthetic biology are in a bid to make them more applicable to things on a human scale.

Project: Post-Apocolympics

Project Blog: http://www.interaction.rca.ac.uk/fictional-sports/
Project Brief: http://www.interaction.rca.ac.uk/fictional-sports/?page_id=2

Project launch with sports ethicist Dr Andy Miah and sports psychologist Dr Katie Dray.
Scenario building and quick film making workshop with Charlotte Jarvis and J Paul Neeley.
Noam took us to the Design Museum to see the new 'Designed to Win' Exhibition and meet the curator Alex Newsom.
Nina took us to see the post-Olympic site, Olympic Legacy, her project Abbey Gardens and meet DI alumni Oliver from We Made That at their newly design playground in East London.

My Project -
Games models are becoming more embedded in our everyday lives.
The Quantified Self community monitor and record their behaviours and actions in a bid understand themselves better and improve things such as sleep, eating habits and healthy living, through incentive and reward based behavioural models. As a result some of their decisions and actions are dictated via perceived patterns in the data they collect on themselves to try and reach goals they set. What if people start to analyse their relationships with family, friends and colleagues in a bid to try and understand themselves better or improve / alter / manipulate relationships with others? What effect will this have on physical interactions with others?

Las Vagas Carpet Collection

Taken during the Design Interactions LA — Vegas trip 2011

Drawing Room

I took part in a study to identify links between dyslexia and drawing at college. The results seemed to prove inconclusive but I got a three day lesson on how to draw.

Top = before
Bottom = after

Visited: Red Tape - Imagining the Future @ RCA

RED TAPE  06

Imagining the Future

6:00 pm Thursday 28h June 2012
Hockney Gallery Stevens Building Kensington Gore SW7 2EU

How do the intersections between art and science create new visions of society and of our environment? The pictorial turn in the sciences has gone far beyond a means of documentation, but has developed new visualisation strategies such as simulations, models, and visual representations that allow artifacts to be given a life-like appearance – how does this affect popular imagination? This discussion through exploring the merging fields of art, deScience fiction writers created visualizations of ideas for alternate worlds and realities – forcing us to look at our own anew. How does our imagining of the future effect our reality today and our future realities? With the massive technological leaps that surround our daily lives, is the future predictable or in fact unimaginable due to the infinite created choices that lay before us. sign, technology and science aims to look back at looking forward, as well as exploring art that critically and experimentally engages with science, posing questions of what we as visual communicators could do to spark conversations about our changing world.

Stelarc
Nicola Triscott
Revital Cohen
Luke Robert Mason

Pre-reader - http://redtape.rca.ac.uk/img/prereader/prereader2012/prereader_2012_06.pdf
http://redtape.rca.ac.uk/

Tour of Design Interactions at Show RCA 2012 with Tony Dunne

From Dezeen - http://www.dezeen.com/2012/06/25/movie-tour-of-design-interactions-at-show-rca-2012-with-tony-dunne/

Production City

- The city as a production line, expressed through abstracted and manipulated collected sound. Research from The Mass Ornament project. 

Project: Film workshop

Seen: Jaywick Escapes @ RCA

https://vimeo.com/32045008

"The government recently named Jaywick the most deprived place in England, yet this decaying seaside resort casts a powerful spell over its inhabitants, drifters whose reasons to escape here are revealed across a year beside the sea."

- A film by Somewhere: Nina Pope and Karen Guthrie

See a penny pick it up

then all day you'll have good luck.

It exists as metal, paper, plastic or sometimes just a number. It determines where you live. Influences who you socialise with. Gets you up for work in the morning and preoccupies thoughts as you fall asleep. Sometimes it has come and gone before you even notice. Money is stitched into the fabric of almost every aspect of our lives.

This penny is intended to be given away rather than spent. Making people consider where it has come from, where it will go and question our current relationship and behaviours with money. It is to encourage pleasure in giving and distract from habitual spending.

http://paradise.rca.ac.uk/?p=90

Developed from our project on philanthropy. Being exhibited at RCA Paradise Exhibition in Milan.

RCA Paradise Exhibition @ Milan Salone 2012

At this year's Salone Internazionale del Mobile the Royal College of Art will present Paradise, an exhibition organised by the Design Products programme including for the first time, work by students from across the College's art and design disciplines.

Paradise contemplates the discovery of something or somewhere wondrous. Rallied by the desire for change and compelled by dissatisfaction with the present, RCA students will author their own atlases of paradise, landscaped by different paths in the quest for a better future. The work exhibited will address three subjects: the exploration of personal dreams and desires; questioning the fabric of the everyday; and speculation on the direction of our future. Product and furniture design will be evident as well as conceptual pieces in a variety of media. The exhibition content has been selected by Professor Tord Boontje, Head of Design Products at the RCA and curated by designer and RCA tutor Onkar Kular.

Paradise will be located in the heart of the Ventura Lambrate district with students taking over the classrooms of a former school building. The exhibition is part of the College's 175th anniversary celebrations and will show an international audience the breadth of creativity coming from the world's most influential postgraduate university of art and design.

"The Design Products programme has been exhibiting successfully at the Milan Salone for several years," commented Dr Paul Thompson, Rector of the RCA. "The opportunity to show a wider selection of student work to an international audience will be a great way to commemorate the College's 175th birthday. Paradise will be a celebration of creativity from across the College, it will reflect the importance of creative thinking and the ways it can alter the world we live in."

http://paradise.rca.ac.uk/

Film Seminar

Saw this at the film seminar last week!

Workshop: Microscopic Life Drawing

At Imperial College as part of Metalab - http://metalabseries.blogspot.co.uk/

Project: Social Computing

Developed from our social computing project for Intel run by Onkar Kular http://www.onkarkular.com/and Matt Jones from Berg http://berglondon.com/

Also shown at the work in progress show.

THE MASS ORNAMENT

"Taylorist ideologies combined with advances in technology have lead to a world where our actions, behaviours, decisions and interactions are largely dictated by computers and premeditated algorithms. The Mass Ornament is a display of this social computing where the performers, choreographed by technology, create a spectacle for their own and the viewer’s entertainment."

The Mass Ornament from Amina Abbas-Nazari on Vimeo.

The Mass Ornament soundtrack on soundcloud -

http://soundcloud.com/search?q%5Bfulltext%5D=amina+nazari

Project: Synthetic Biology

Project run by Design Interaction graduates

http://pohflepp.com/

and

http://www.davidbenque.com/

Project blog here - http://www.interaction.rca.ac.uk/crooked-little-engines/

Brian Eno Talk @ RCA

A lot of talking about nothing really. But I enjoyed it!

Philosophy and haircuts. Surrender and control. His first art school. "Fine art is like the punchline without the joke"

Greyson Perry Talk @ RCA

Big version here - http://strangemaps.files.wordpress.com/2008/02/map_of_an_englishman.jpg

Workshop: Design meets Science

Design Interaction students went to Imperial to talk to some synthetic biologists for our current project.

Speed Dating from nathan on Vimeo.

Work in Progress Show

Workshop: Plausible Worlds with Critical Writing

3 day Group project in collaboration with Critical Writing students at RCA.

Our brief -

Project 5. Rurality Bites

In 2007, for the first time in history, more people were living in cities than in rural areas. If we imagine the migration and breeding patterns to continue exponentially, we can imagine a world, as Ballard did with his short story 'Billenium', where generations of citizens live only in cities. How might these future urbanites understand agriculture, farming, landscape, animals? How might they be educated or in what ways might they gain access to the areas beyond the outskirts?

Our response (inspired by Gwyneth Paltrow and jet lag!) -

GOOP! from nathan on Vimeo.

We also had a talk from Tom McCarthy about a project he did called Greenwich Degree Zero which he did with artist Rod Dickinson

http://www.roddickinson.net/pages/greenwich/project-greenwich.php