Thanks to creativeskills.be, I had the opportunity to attend the World Creativity Forum in Hasselt (Belgium) last week. The lineup of speakers was pretty interesting and highly relevant for both my research and my design research work. I did a short writeup of some key topics, currently written in Dutch, I hope to revisit some of these in more detail in the near future. In general, at least 3 topics came forward a lot : Failure, Context & Tweaking.

The full post can be read here [Dutch]

Geocities was awesome, it’s gone now.

The talk below by Russel Davies provided me with a very useful and relevant metaphor to think about the current status of the internet of things. Russel refers to the, once very popular, geocities. We’re now at the point that people start to mess about with connected things, using something that might lead to a fully fledged internet of things. Thinking about this further, this is very simular to what Mike Creighton wrote about in his post ‘harnessing the abundance‘. Mike talks about how we tend to get lost in creation tools that are, as designers, available at our fingertips due to advances in technology. Yet, we tend to get lost in tools and methods. However, the fact that there is an abundance highlights precisely the point made by Russel; People are starting to poke around with tools like Arduino, littlebits, b-squares, sugru, e-paper, openframeworks, processing, kinect, etc… This indicates that something is happening in the way people, designers and developers go about with the design and integration of technology in their lives. Drawing the analogy with Geocities and how it aided a larger audience to create something on the web is, to me, a very helpful comparison.

A quote read in BERG‘s weeknote 328 which captures a major challenge designers and design practice face in the years to come.

I feel very naive around process right now. I observe that we’re a design company, with a design culture built over 6 years, yet we’re having to cultivate a new engineering culture that sits within it and alongside it, and the two have different crystal grains. It’s good that they do — engineering through a design process can feel harried and for some projects that does not lead to good outcomes. And vice versa. But it throws up all kinds of questions for me: do we really want two domains of engineering and design; what is the common protocol – the common language – of engineering culture, and indeed of our design culture; how do these lattices touch and interact where they meet; how do we go from an unthought process to one chosen deliberately; how is change (the group understanding of, and agreement with a common language) to be brought about, and what will it feel like as it happens.

Firstly, I interpreted “engineering” as computer programming, which is perhaps a very narrow interpretation of the word. Afterwards, I realised it’s about the general engineering logic compared to a designer’s logic. This reminded me of the analogy with the evolution from industrial logic to creative man’s logic, as mentioned in a publication of The Copenhagen Institute for Future studies.

Searching a common langue between a designer’s logic and engineering logic is something I hope to contribute to by weaving some things together. To start with, I aim to focus on some form of language between a designer and a computer programmer or computational/digital creation system … but reflecting further on “engineering” I might need to reconsider the broadness of my horizon.