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  1. Jason Santa Maria on the Influence of Print Design

    At our last Dot Dot Dot lecture, The Influencers, faculty member Jason Santa Maria talks about the influence of print design on web design, and how the established aesthetic techniques used in print aren’t transferrable to the web, and why that is.

    “Our websites don’t need to look like a content dump. They can be more interesting. It takes a little bit more time, but not any more than we would spend laying out magazines. These are processes that are already in place.” —Jason Santa Maria

    Upcoming events include:

    About the Lecture Series
    The Dot Dot Dot Lecture Series is meant for broad explorations of interaction design, business, and aesthetic inspiration. Practitioners and thought leaders give short talks in an informal setting. Wisdom will be revealed and methods will be shared in a environment intended to satisfy both social and scholarly pursuits.

  2. Mobile Technologies Mobilizing Healthcare

    Project Masiluleke (which means “lend a helping hand” in Zulu), a seminal partnership between frog design, Pop!Tech, iTeach, The Praekelt Foundation, Aricent, Nokia Siemens and other collaborators, is using mobile technology to tackle the worst HIV epidemic in the world in an area of South Africa, KwaZulu Natal, where infection rates are over 40%. The Economist recently reported on how new technologies are transforming healthcare, highlighting the work of frog design and Project M. 

    • The Future of Healthcare Is In Your Hand(set), frog design mind
    • A Doctor in Your Pocket, The Economist

    • Lecture: “The Service Designers,” June 10


      Join us for the next in our lecture series featuring four speakers giving four talks in forty minutes. This month’s topic:

      “The Service Designers”
      While far more attention is still paid to the design of products, there is an argument to be made that we’ve entered a service economy. It’s not only products that are designable experiences; services are creating new challenges for designers and are increasingly demanding attention. As the line between products and services blurs (if it ever was there before), the emergence of service design has risen to demand a need for new ways of working to make for more meaningful services—whether those services are tangible, intangible, or a combination. Four designers engage in 10-minute discussions about the service sector and its different design challenges. Featured Speakers:

      Speakers

      • Jennifer Bove, Principal, Kicker Studio
      • Chenda Fruchter, Assistant Commissioner, Director of Content & Agency Relations, Department of Information Technology and Telecommunication, New York City
      • Sylvia Harris, Information Design Strategist
      • Jun Lee, Partner, ReD Associates, New York

      Details

      Wednesday, June 10
      6:30PM – 8:30PM
      White Rabbit
      145 E Houston Street b/t 1st and 2nd Avenues (View Map)

      Click here to RSVP.

      Event Partner Select attendees will receive gifts from our event partner, Webstock.

      About the Lecture Series

      The Dot Dot Dot Lecture Series is meant for broad explorations of interaction design, business, and aesthetic inspiration. Practitioners and thought leaders give short talks in an informal setting. Wisdom will be revealed and methods will be shared in a environment intended to satisfy both social and scholarly pursuits.

      About MFA in Interaction Design

      The MFA in Interaction Design program trains students to research, analyze, prototype, and design concepts in their business, social, and cultural contexts. Today, business success depends on the presence of a well-designed, engaging experience, and the new MFA in Interaction Design program explores the strategic role of interaction design in shaping everyday life.

    • The Coroflot Creative Employment Confab

      Coroflot, our event partner for the April and May Dot Dot Dot lectures will host the Creative Employment Confab on May 15 at the Art Directors Club in New York City. Join chair of the department, Liz Danzico with Michael Lebowitz, CEO, Big Spaceship; Johnny Vulkan, Partner, Anomaly; and Judy Wert, Executive Recruiter, Wert & Co. in a panel discussion about today’s creative industry and tomorrow’s creative employment.

      About the event:
      A networking & knowledge-sharing event for creative professionals, the New York Confab is the second installment in our series of networking events geared for people working in all aspects of today’s creative industry. Attendees will have an opportunity to share insights, connections and successes with leading creative and technical professionals and meet with hiring representatives from companies looking for this type of talent.

      Visit Coroflot to learn more about or register for the event.

    • A Conversation with Rob Faludi

      Whether designing interactions for a clean-tech startup, educating graduates on the fundamentals of physical computing, or running workshops enabling the making of ninja wireless gloves, Rob Faludi is concerned with interactions that engage people in the real world. Recently back from ETech where he led a conversation on smart energy and what’s ahead, Rob chatted with us about not only the work he’ll be doing in the MFA program and but also what’s on the horizon.

      School of Visual Arts: You’re teaching The Fundamentals of Physical Computing to the MFA students this fall. Why is this kind of hands–on exploration critical to graduate students in interaction design? How are you approaching it?

      Rob Faludi: People are physical, so the richest interactions engage us as grabbing-leaning-jumping-head-banging beings rather than mere accessories to the screen and keyboard. We’re alive and embodied and attracted to interactions that treat us like whole humans. That’s what physical computing is all about — crafting interactive things that are capable of meeting us on our own terms in the real world.

      In Fundamentals of Physical Computing, we become facile with technologies for sensing, reacting, and with the algorithmic machinery that links inputs to outputs in physical devices. Rather than skim the surface in a broad survey, we take a deep dive to discover the tools needed to begin immediately prototyping physical interactions. The learning is better that way.

      Code is easier to understand when it’s directly linked to physical output. Technical skills make more sense when they’re applied to solving interface challenges. Along the way students get hands-on experience generating affordances, writing programs, hooking up electronics, then trying out their creations on real people. By the end, they have the practical skills needed to design compelling real-world experiences for their fellow travelers.

      SVA: Recently Botanicalls, a project you collaborate on, has been getting quite a bit of press. What other projects are you working on that are keeping you going? What are you most excited about?


      Botanicalls opens a new channel of communication between plants and humans, in an effort to promote successful inter-species understanding.

      RF: A lot of my energy is going into a new, clean-tech startup called GroundedPower that does wireless home energy monitoring. I’m tasked with developing the device networking, and am also involved in design of the human interactions that provide real-time information about energy consumption and support efficiency goals. We’re rolling out a pilot to 100 homes this month on Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard, doing our part to keep the polar bears afloat.


      GroundedPower

      There’s several ongoing open-source projects as well. We just showed the LilyPad XBee wearable sew-on radios at ETech in San Jose. I’m developing a ZigBee Internet Gateway so that people prototyping wireless devices can easily connect to web services using inexpensive, low power components and the simplest possible code. Oh, and there’s some work in producing compact sensors for performance that’s still in the early stages but should be up on my blog before long.


      LilyPad XBee, a radio transceiver you can sew onto your clothing to create wireless wearables

      On the horizon, I’ve been thinking a lot about our increasingly tenuous connection to nature. Over the past few months I’ve happened into a series of conversations with technologically savvy people who report a curious combination of information overload, a ramping up of commercialized social interactions, and immersion in low-resolution media. It seems to result in a disturbing sense that the natural world and opportunities for deep thought are slipping through their grasp. I think this creates a compelling opportunity for humane countermeasures, and I’m toying with some ideas around this theme to explore in a summer or fall project. In addition to mastering technical skills in the MFA program, we may get an opportunity to develop interactions that quench our thirst for something wild.

       

    • Rachel Abrams: Thoughts on Postopolis

      Over at Urban Omnibus, faculty member Rachel Abrams joins design writer Alissa Walker in a review of last week’s Postopolis LA. Sponsored by the Storefront for Art & Architecture and ForYourArt, the five-day “blogathon” on architecture, urbanism, landscape, and design was a 5PM to 11PM conversation binge set at the very real, live concrete roof atop The Standard Hotel in Los Angeles.

      Here’s a teaser:

      R:

      Did you feel like this was primarily a celebration of blogging or of architecture or urbanism or something else all together?

      A:

      I think it represented a very interesting convergence of information and urbanism. I think blogging as a phenomenon is kind of boring to talk about, but what it represents is really just a faster way of disseminating good ideas about where and how we live (and Twitter is maybe even better). Maybe the point of all this is that we’re able to affect cities more intelligently by understanding them better, and now, thanks to our ability to share this information more efficiently, we will? What do you think?

      R:

        I absolutely agree that the draw for me was far more the subject matter, than the format - I’m taking the ‘it’s the content, stupid’ approach, as usual. Converging on shared interests creates community, and that’s one reason I made the trip out here - to participate, instead of just reading about it. When I’ve described Postopolis to others, I’ve made a point of saying it’s about urbanism and technology: the intersection of physical place and information space, not just about blogging about cities.

      That said, there’s definitely a quality to this that’s defined by the format - something appealing about seeing some of my favorite online foragers coming out from behind the screen to put faces to what and who they’ve gathered on their blogs. I mean, when I scroll through archive lists of months and years of posts, my mind boggles that there’s a real person, with bills to pay and a life to lead, behind these editorial ziggurats that the rest of us gobble up and trade with others. But more impressive than the discipline of maintaining that curatorial role is what they’ve documented: Yes, your idea that we’re able to impose ourselves on the city by understanding it better is key; how better representations of cities improve our understanding, experience and engagement with cities is of particular interest to me - I’m here for the dynamic data visualizers, the graphic storytellers, the spoken word poets, pretty much anyone who forsakes PowerPoint.

      Read the full review, “The Post Postopolis Post,” at Urban Omnibus.

    • Kicker Studio launches Interview Series

      Last week, thesis faculty Jennifer Bove of Kicker Studio launched an interview series, profiling some of their favorite designers. Every few weeks, Kicker will feature someone new, asking him or her six simple questions:

      What’s the most cherished product in your life?
      What’s the one product you wish you’d designed?
      What excites you about being a designer?
      When do you first remember thinking of yourself as a designer?
      What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned, and who taught it to you?
      What are five things all designers should know?

      Read…

      ...to find out what makes them tick.

      We’re looking forward to Jennifer taking part in students’ thesis projects and more interviews from Kicker!

    • MFA IxD on Flickr

      We’re on Twitter. We’re on Facebook. Now you can follow the dot dot dots to our Flickr Photostream for a visual construction update of the department. Our wood floors are being installed, circuits wired, by mid-May we’ll have classrooms, and come June we’ll officially move into our new space in the Flatiron District.

    • Jake Barton Lecture “Designing Public History”

      If you are in or around Providence this Friday, join faculty member Jake Barton for a lecture, “Designing Public History,” at Brown University. Jake is founder and principal of Local Projects, and the lecture will be co-presented with Rosten Woo, executive director and co-founder of The Center for Urban Pedagogy.

      How do current events and lived experience evolve and settle into what is considered “history?” How can representations of the past influence our interpretation of the present? This messy process involves discourse, dialogue, and negotiations between major and minor histories, public and private stories. Here to discuss their parts in the process are Jake Barton of Local Projects and Rosten Woo of the Center For Urban Pedagogy, two leading firms that design public history in a variety of formats. Their projects deal with a wide spectrum of contexts and approaches: from the challenges of designing for national institutions like the September 11 Memorial Museum at the World Trade Center or NPR’s StoryCorps, to the problems of recasting the history of a single maligned street in Brooklyn. In their presentations, Barton and Woo will investigate the role of conflict, aesthetics and voice in representing public history.

      Friday, April 10, 12:00-1:30PM John Nicholas Brown Center Nightingale Brown House, Library Brown University, Providence, RI