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Donate to Fabricate – Remaking COLLOQUY – Update #3

Female forms (left, center, and right) and male forms (rectangular in shape, in front of the female in center.
Female forms (left, center, and right) and male forms (rectangular in shape, in front of the female in center). Rendered from 3D digital model.

To raise visibility and reach our funding goals, a COLLOQUY 2018 DONATE page is now available. In just a few days we’ve raised over $1,400 in individual donations from $25 to $500. We appreciate these generous gifts as well as those of our major donors, who have contributed $27K to date. We’re aiming for $34K by May 11th, our intended opening at the annual CCS Student Exhibition.

The gnarliest challenge to replicating a full-scale version of Gordon Pask‘s work for our COLLOQUY 2018 Project is the so-called “female” mobile shape for Colloquy. We consulted the extraordinary craft facilities here at College for Creative Studies and a few great local fabrication shops in Detroit. (Whoa, now I know what “rotocasting” is.)  Continue reading “Donate to Fabricate – Remaking COLLOQUY – Update #3”

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Paper Presented – Remaking COLLOQUY – Progress Update #2

side-by-side female body
Side-by-side comparison: Photo of original female mobile and 3D-printed model of the female body by TJ McLeish
Comparison of published diagram of design and Colloquy as built in 1968
Some of the discrepancies of Pask’s published diagram (left) and Colloquy as built in 1968 (right). The upper part of each side is a plan (view from above the mobiles) and the lower part is a section (view from the side).

I wonder if you’ve heard of the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour—I love all that, all the way down to the extra ‘u’ for the UK spelling.  As part of their annual conference, AISB held a Symposium in Liverpool today called Cybernetic Serendipity Reimagined, where I gave a 12-minute presentation on the status of the COLLOQUY 2018 Project (download the audio here and slides to follow along here). The presentation was a recap of progress on the project based on a paper published by AISB written by TJ McLeish, master fabricator of the COLLOQUY project, and myself.

Continue reading “Paper Presented – Remaking COLLOQUY – Progress Update #2”

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Talking about The Future of Cybernetics

Click here to see the video from the talk. Click here to download the PDF of the slides.

Cybernetics is often confused with robotics and AI, chip implants and biomechatronics, and more. Don’t want to disappoint you but cybernetics is none of those things (though it has a lot to say about all of them). Cybernetics is not freezing dead people, neither. (I’m hoping that’s less of a surprise. Maybe not.)

worlds fair nano
Worlds Fair Nano – March 2018 – San Francisco

Hoping to clear up all that confusion in 20 minutes, I gave a talk on Saturday, March 10th, 2018, at 2pm at Worlds Fair Nano in San Francisco.

To speak about the future of cybernetics (as in this short video) is to speak about its past and present (requiring another short video). In an era that vacillates between rampant AI utopianism and rampant AI dystopianism, what does cybernetics have to offer our future? Continue reading “Talking about The Future of Cybernetics”

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Remaking COLLOQUY – Progress Update #1

Colloquy as imagined and situated in staging space

No, our replica of The Colloquy of Mobiles is not yet real—this is only a photoshopped image of how it will look in our staging space in May at College for Creative Studies in Detroit (CCS). But the photo speaks our intention and hints at our progress.

The CCS MFA Interaction Design (IxD)‘s Colloquy 2018 Project— to remake Gordon Pask‘s original installation at London’s Institute for Contemporary Arts in 1968—is well under way.

CCS students have been mining the historical materials on The Colloquy and building a repository of understanding to share with the world.  Continue reading “Remaking COLLOQUY – Progress Update #1”

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Remaking Pask’s COLLOQUY OF MOBILES

Gordon Pask's COLLOQUY OF MOBILES 1968
COLLOQUY OF MOBILES 1968 (www.medienkunstnetz.de)

Imagine walking into a gallery and seeing these larger-than-life mobiles hanging from the ceiling — they rotate, blink, squawk, and sometimes synchronize with each other, completely without human intervention. You walk among them, blocking their interactions, using a flashlight to attract their attention, wanting to get in on their conversation.

This was Gordon Pask’s COLLOQUY OF MOBILES at the Institute for Contemporary Art in London, part of an exhibition called Cybernetic Serendipity in 1968. Yes, 50 years ago in 1968 — an exploration of machine-to-machine and person-to-machine conversations in an interactive, immersive environment, perhaps the first of its kind. Frequently praised for its originality and influence, Pask’s COLLOQUY is a precursor to practices of contemporary art and design, as well as a prescient vision of our future with machines that may choose to act on their own.

Continue reading “Remaking Pask’s COLLOQUY OF MOBILES”

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Cybernetics, Design, and Society

Cybernetics Conference logo
Logo for Cybernetics.social by Dan Taeyoung

The Cybernetics Conference, held in New York City on November 18, 2017, was an extraordinary gathering of passionate individuals interested in design, media studies, art, and the future of society.

At the conference opening, Michael Yap and I held a keynote conversation titled “Now What: Cybernetics, Design, and Society.” The livestream of this keynote is available, as well as a PDF of the slides (thanks to Michael and Pooja Upadhyay).

The entire conference livestream is available here.

We want to acknowledge the fabulous arrangements from all of the organizers, especially Sam Hart, Melanie Hoff (who also did program and website design), and Francis Tseng. Special thanks to Joly McFie who ran the webcast and was the only person at the conference who was present at Cybernetic Serendipity in 1968 in London, mentioned during our talk.

I personally hope The Cybernetics Conference, New York City, becomes a yearly event, perhaps a resurgence of the Macy Meetings, that were the foundation of the breadth and depth of cybernetics, held in the 1940s and 1950s. It is time.

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Alan Kay gives lecture to CCS IxD

Dynabook
From Alan Kay’s “A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages”, 1972

It would be tl;dr for a blogpost to explain the originality and contributions that Alan Kay has made to interaction design. We’re fortunate that he delivered an extended real-time lecture by video on October 9, 2017, to grad and undergrad students, hosted by the Interaction Design Evolution course, a.k.a. Studio III in the MFA Interaction Design program at CCS.

Alan has been deeply influencing interaction design from the time he conceived what we now call the iPad—though his concept went much further and was explicitly a learning tool. And he named it more descriptively: the Dynabook (1968-1972). He had a relationship with Steve Jobs and famously said that he thought the original Mac from 1984 was “the first personal computer good enough to be criticized.” Wait… what? Yup.

Continue reading “Alan Kay gives lecture to CCS IxD”

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Designing Our World

Design as ConversationTo “design our world” has been the goal of every human generation. Every day we wake up to an invitation to become whom we wish to become. I believe the role of design is to help all of us to achieve that goal for ourselves — that is, to be designers of our own world.

Ambitious, I realize. As is trying to tame wicked problems through design.

But what is “design” anyway? Why isn’t “design thinking” enough? And what’s this got to do with cybernetics, anyway? I offer viewpoints in my Heinz von Foerster ’17 Lecture, entitled Designing Our World: Cybernetics as Conversations for Action. See the abstract, video, and supporting materials here.

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My First iPhone

I remember June 29, 2007, as if it were yesterday (almost). I bought my first iPhone from the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue in New York City on the first day it came out. I had worked all day on a typical consulting gig from my apartment, which was a 10-minute walk to the flagship Apple store. Around 4pm I had done enough so I figured, What the hell? — yes, it was that casual — I’d stroll over to see what was up. What I found was a party. I hadn’t intended to, but I got on line to buy. Continue reading “My First iPhone”

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Be Part of the Evolution of Interaction Design

In Fall 2017, the MFA program at CCS is introducing a new studio course called “Interaction Design Evolution.” The course invites students to riff on prior innovations in the history of interaction design and then to invent their own. Seriously.

memex
Rendering of Vannevar Bush’s MEMEX concept from 1945

One example from history: Vannevar Bush’s “MEMEX” comes from the 1940’s. Bush conceived it as a desk containing vast amounts of information stored on reels of microfiche (because digital magnetic media didn’t yet exist). Bush imagined retrieval of information based on what we now call tagging, achieved here by visual splotches on the edge of the frames of microfiche. We’ve got tagging in modern, digital web browsers (with vastly greater numbers of tags and vastly greater speed). But Bush also imagined two displays—not one, as we have today. Why?

Continue reading “Be Part of the Evolution of Interaction Design”