NEWS - KithKin Presents at DesignersBlock, LDF

A few weeks ago now I took part in KithKin Presents which was part of DesignersBlock at London Design Festival.

It took place at Earls Court alongside 100% Design

Work from 18 recent graduates was featured. You can see all our work at KithKin Presents and more photos from the exhibition at KithKin Presents on Flickr

There was some really interesting work at Designer's Block and I really enjoyed taking part and meeting the other guys who also exhibited. It was also really exciting that our stand was right next door to the stand of some recent graduates from the RCA Design Interactions course under the title of 'Disruptive Thinking'. They had some really cool pieces on display.

NEWS - My Work Featured in Trendease International after Design Week

http://www.trendease.com/?g=1434-409d97958d855c5

Makes my eyes go funny

>> Wonderwall <<

I'm supposed to be researching business opportunities for the Citizens Advice Bureau but somehow started reading about -

Open innovation.........

Innocentive is a website that encourages people to get together via the internet to solve problems. They say -

We believe in the power of open innovation, bringing together creative minds to create breakthrough solutions that touch every human life.

Founded in 2001, InnoCentive connects companies, academic institutions, public sector and non-profit organizations, all hungry for breakthrough innovation, with a global network of more than 180,000 of the world's brightest minds on the world's first Open Innovation Marketplace™.

These creative thinkers -- engineers, scientists, inventors, and business people with expertise in life sciences, engineering, chemistry, math, computer science, and entrepreneurship -- join the InnoCentive Solver™ community to solve some of the world's toughest challenges.

Seeker™ organizations post their challenges on the InnoCentive web site, and offer registered Solvers significant financial awards for the best solutions. Seeker™ and Solver™ identities are kept completely confidential and secure, and InnoCentive manages the entire IP process.

Still perfecting the art of writing covering letters.....I found this -

Take the stairs!

What the?!

seabreacher is a submersible watercraft inspired by dolphins.
the vehicle is designed and manufactured by innespace productions and comes in a few different
models as well as customized builds. just like a dolphin, the seabreacher can jump dive and roll
through the water at speeds of up to 40mph or 20mph underwater. the driver and a passenger are
kept dry inside a sealed cockpit, but are free to look around through the glass top. the boat took
over 10 years to develop and is now easy enough to drive and maintain for the average person.
the design retails for around 48,000 USD and comes with a number of options such as additional
view ports and custom upholstery.

from DesignBoom

more here

NEWS - KithKin Presents at London Design Festival

After seeing my work at New Designers, design collective KithKin kindly asked me to be part of an exhibition they are organising called KithKin Presents during London Design Festival, which will showcase a selection of graduate work. The exhibition is part of Designers Block, that is at Earls Court this year, alongside 100% design. The exhibition runs 24th-27th September and I will be exhibition my If Objects Could Speak project. Hope to see you there.

One for the christmas list

Lego are launching their own range electronics / gadgets. Unofficial Lego products have been on the market for some time now but this is the first time they have manufactured their own. Products will include digital camera, mp3 player and boombox.

Read more at DesignBoom

NEWS - Cascade_09

Last week we had our final cascade_09 group presentation at the BFI. Even though it was quite informal I still managed to get nervous but I think it went well. Also, thanks to John Nussey we were able to create a working mock-up of our idea using Arduino.

I really enjoyed the whole project and met some great people.

The video below gives some highlights from our week working at the Doodle Bar.

onedotzero_cascade 09 from onedotzero on Vimeo.

NEWS - If Objects Could Speak...

Despite my website being offline currently, my project still seems to be popping up on the internet which is good.

Here -

DeTank has become DeTnk

http://teagantall.blogspot.com/2009/09/amina-nazari-if-objects-could-speak.html

DesignKlub

NEWS - Cascade_09. Continued.

Throughout the week, in the mornings, were given talks from different designers, agencies and people from industry. Then they normally stayed around for the rest of the day to chat with us about our ideas and help us with our projects.

I really enjoyed the presentations. It was interesting, for me, coming from a product design background, to compare how people in other industries work. A lot of the presentations talked about interactive design, digital media and their applications which was really exciting.

Presentations included:

Glue London - who worked with us a lot through out the week. Also, included a talk by their head of innovation Dom O'brien which was really cool. I've decided I want his job! They talked us through a research and development project involving face recognition software which was really exciting.

Onedotzero - who arranged cascade_09 in conjunction with d&ad, talked us through what they do and their work all over the world. And they have been following us and the progress of our work on their blog

Quayola - Davide from Quayloa came to talk to us about his moving image work and showed us some of his amazing audio / visual pieces. They are amazing. Watch the video below.

Strata #2 (extract 1) from Quayola on Vimeo.

Greyworld - Andrew Shoben from Greyworld gave a very entertaining presentation that everyone really enjoyed. I'd heard of greyworld before but wasn't actually that familiar with their work or the way they work. What they did didn't seem like work, just like good fun!

John Nussey - talked us through some of his projects. I really liked his biosphere. Our group is hoping to work with him to make a working mock-up of our idea for the presentation at the BFI in September.

Squint Opera - set up Doodle Bar where we got to work for the week. A very cool space to work! They talked about their projects visualising architecture work.

Overall a really exciting and inspiring week that has helped me take a fresh look at design, different design disciples and different opportunities in the design industry.

NEWS - Cascade_09

I was selected to take part in this years cascade event, being held at Doodle Bar Battersea run by d&ad and onedotzero.

There was about 30 of us on the project all together and we were split up into groups of about 8 people, all from different design disciplines such as graphic design, moving image, interactive design...

A week long project, with our ideas being presented at the end of the week. Then on the 10th September we present the ideas again but this time at the BFI on the Southbank, infront of the public and a panel of people from industry.

We were set the brief - re-imagining your city

how can you inject artistic elements into your urban surroundings to brighten, enliven, improve everyday life for the inhabitants. re-imagining the city continues onedotzero’s ongoing investigations of the contemporary city experience, explored urbanism and the concept of the contemporary city, the impact of regeneration, migration flows, creative capital and urbanization of the city and the built environment. create a role where you are in charge of ideas to reshape and effect the city in a positive way.

deliver concepts that are real world interventions with online extension to support your visions and concepts. the full range of online tools should also be used to communicate, document, and map the projects developments and process. how can you connect the online community with the real community to your ideas?

Objectives:

1. network and meet graduates from other disciplines for future collaborations

2. understand and take advantage of learning other processes, vocabulary and perspectives from the various disciplines

3. this project is as much about the process you will go through and the conversations as it is about a final concept.

4. document the whole process to show how you arrived at your final concept, process is as important as the final result - you need to be able to demonstrate that

5. experiment and think about how you want to present your concept at the BFI - there are no rules - its up to you as a group

6. collaborate

You can see our groups process, progress and ideas on our BLOG (we are called Limedotzero)

working at Doodle Bar!

Visited: Telling Tales @ the V&A

I went to see the new design exhibition at the V&A called Telling Tales - fantasy and fear in contemporary design.

It was quite good. An interesting range of pieces, nicely curated. I also went to the design museum, the same day, but wasn't that impressed. Definitely recommend the V&A over the current exhibits at the design museum and its free.

Telling Tales: Fantasy and Fear in Contemporary Design from Victoria and Albert Museum on Vimeo.

http://www.vam.ac.uk/microsites/telling-tales/

This exhibition explores the recent trend among European designers for unique or limited edition pieces that push the boundaries between art and design. It showcases furniture, lighting and ceramics, designed by a new generation of international designers, including Tord Boontje, Maarten Baas, Jurgen Bey and Studio Job, who are all inspired by the spirit of story-telling. Each tells a tale through their use of decorative devices, historical allusions or choice of materials, sharing common themes such as fantasy, parody and a concern with mortality.

1,2,3

three frame animation (For some reason the image has trouble loading sometimes. Click the image box to take you to the website where you can see lots of photos!)

www.brightlightbrightlight.com

jaime martinez

I got bored filling in job applications -

In April 2009, Lenka Clayton & Michael Crowe sent a personal, handwritten letter to each of the 467 households in the small Irish village of Cushendall. They hoped these unsolicited letters would prompt neighbourly discussion, spreading across the town, promoting community curiosity. The art work consists solely of the discussion between the recipients about what on Earth these letters are, who sent them and why, etc.Mysterious Letters Project.

Personas shows you how the Internet sees you...

I'm not sure how accurate it is but it looks really cool and I find the whole concept very interesting.

http://personas.media.mit.edu/


What is Personas?
Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, currently on display at theMIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab. It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one's aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.



How does it work?
Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person - to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.



Philosophy
In a world where fortunes are sought through data-mining vast information repositories, the computer is our indispensable but far from infallible assistant. Personas demonstrates the computer's uncanny insights and its inadvertent errors, such as the mischaracterizations caused by the inability to separate data from multiple owners of the same name. It is meant for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world, where digital histories are as important if not more important than oral histories, and computational methods of condensing our digital traces are opaque and socially ignorant.



Credits
Personas was created by Aaron Zinman, with help from Alex Dragulescu, Yannick Assogba and Judith Donath.

I'm really not that good at writing covering letters...

Recognition of Facial Expressions Not Universal -

: )

(^_^)

http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/?p=791

Myth of Myself

By Alan Watts

He talks a bit like I think sometimes.

The music isn't really necessary but what he has to say is quite interesting.

Multi Exposure

Multiple exposure of lights on blades of grounded Sikorsky helicopter forming
slinky-like pattern in the sky as rotors turn. By Andreas Feininger

NEWS - If Objects Could Speak...featured on DesignBoom, Fast Company and The Salt Lake Tribune Newspaper!

After my 'If Objects Could Speak...' project was featured on DesignBoom's daily coverage I was contacted by a website in America called Fast Company who wanted to write about my project. They wrote quite a nice article about it - here where my project was described as 'Scrapbooking, for the RFID Age ' which I found quite interesting because I hadn't really thought of it in that way before.

Following on from that I was contacted by a lady in Utah called Linda Fantin who said 'I read about your RFID storytelling device and found the idea fascinating especially as it relates to my passion, scrapbooking and memory preservation. I would like to learn more about your idea and write about it in my monthly scrapbooking column in The Salt Lake Tribune, a newspaper in Utah, the epicenter of modern scrapbooking. (Members of the Mormon faith are encouraged to document their family histories, fueling the past-time's popularity.)'

Again it hadn't really occurred to me that my project may be of interest to these kind of people. Before the project, for me, was purely based on ideas but now it seems it could actually have some commercial purpose. She went on to say 'There are more than a 100 major scrapbooking supply manufacturers in Utah.'

She also wrote a very interesting article, but more in depth and it can be read here.

My project is also due to feature in the September issue of Contagious Magazine.

I'm pleased that after not having much interested at New Designers that people are now contacting me for more information. It's clear now that my work didn't really belong in that environment. I'm also pleased that it has got people thinking about RFID technology and how it can be used for different applications.

NEWS - New Designers 2009

New Designers was a couple of weeks ago now. I exhibited my 'If Objects Could Speak..." project alongside the rest of my class from Kingston University who graduated this year.

If I'm honest I didn't really enjoy it that much. It was like a weird trade show and for me it felt like a very strange environment to be in. Nevertheless it was nice to exhibit with my friends again, after the degree show and see all our work together.

Photos by Naomi Winters. Click to enlarge.

Variations on normal

Dominic Wilcox (designer) "When I was a youngster I used to have an emotional attachment to the litter I made. For example if I took an orange from my house and went to a friends house to play, I wouldn’t be able to leave the orange peel in a bin at the house of my friend. I felt that the peel was from my house, and it would be distressed if it was left in a foreign place. So I would put it back in my pocket to return it to my house’s bin. Though I generally forgot to empty my pockets and so gathered a mix of receipts, tickets, sweet wrappers and organics. Even now I find I have so much in my pockets making it difficult to find anything. In this age of separating your rubbish for recycling here is the idea applied to pockets. Separating your plastic from your paper and orange peel will never be a problem again. This may not appeal to fashionistas as I was told that actually putting things in pockets is a big no no. The lumps ruin your lines apparently. © 2009"

http://variationsonnormal.com/

Abitacolo

"abitacolo" is where the pilot sits on a plane, or where the humans ride in a car. Bruno Munari, designed abitacolo in 1971 for the Italian furniture company Robots.

Abitacolo is a modular fixture for a kid's room that combines storage, play and sleeping in one reconfigurable wire-frame package.

if i was 10 again i would really, really want one of these. actually i'd still quite like one.

Minimal Bike Rack

if you didn't already know i really like cycling, bikes and anything related!

I found this at www.swiss-miss.com

I'm supposed to be folding laundry

Jeppe Hein’s Loop Bench

i really like this playful seating installation. reminds me of a marble run.

Magnetic Sixth Sense

http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mods/news/2006/06/71087

"What if, seconds before your laptop began stalling, you could feel the hard drive spin up under the load? Or you could tell if an electrical cord was live before you touched it? For the few people who have rare earth magnets implanted in their fingers, these are among the reported effects -- a finger that feels electromagnetic fields along with the normal sense of touch."

Real Time

Real Time expo by Maarten Baas

I'm currently quite obsessed with date and time. Not sure why but I've been thinking about it a lot.

NEWS - Betty Blogs

I live in a household with some other designers, a fine artist and someone who does textiles. We are all quite creative and quite often talk about interesting things we have been reading about or cool things we have seen or new ideas. We have lived in our house for two years now and for some reason the house has always been called Betty, but we are due to move out at the beginning of next month, July. Me and the other housemates recently set up a blog so we can still share things we find and ideas with each other easily, even after we have moved out of Betty and are not all living together.

Click here to view Betty's blog

NEWS - Degree Show

Our degree show just finished last week. I think it went pretty well, it was quite busy and overall looked really good. There was some really interesting work and I liked how varied the work was in the show. You could quite clearly see each person's personality in the pieces they had designed. I'm quite looking forward to taking the show to New Designers in July now, having seen everything come together I can now imagine what it's going to look like.

Click the image to see it big.

by Sir X