The latest set in the series of interviews I did for COFA Online have now gone online.

Jona Piehl from Land Design Studio talks about the challenges and role of design for large exhibitions and the collaboration involved:

Tom Roope, one of the founders of The Rumpus Room, talks about the crossover of traditional media with interactive and social media forms:

Thanks once again to Rachel Meyrick (a.k.a. Rachel Lewis) for the camera and editing work.

Most of the interviews we shot for COFA Online have now gone online. A few others with Jona Piehl from Land Design Studio and Nik’s brother, Tom Roope from The Rumpus Room will be released next year and they all explore working in the grey area of merging and emerging disciplines.

Nik Roope gives some great insights into the thinking behind many of Poke’s successful projects:

Sebastien Noel and Eva Rucki from Troika on their cross-disciplinary projects:

Here, Mark Hauenstein talks about his journey from studying fine art to being head of Research and Development at AllofUs:

Thanks to Rachel for the great camera and editing work.

A few months ago I trekked around London with my filmaker and editor friend Rachel to shoot a whole load of interviews with designers and artists for COFAOnline. I still teach online for the College of Fine Arts at UNSW in Australia and these interviews will form an independent site as an ongoing resource as well as teaching material for the Masters of Cross-Disciplinary Art & Design. They are also being put up on YouTube and here are the first ones with Brendan Dawes and Simon Waterfall:

Core77 have just posted an interview and profile I wrote on Dan Saffer and hhis new book, Designing Gestural Interfaces. Dan talks about his vision for future devices and the way design agencies need to shift to a much more multi-disciplinary way of working if they are to survive.

I’ll just point you to “Talk to the Hand: Dan Saffer and Gestural Interfaces” on Core77 rather than spill more beans here.

Troika have a new book out called Digital by Design: Crafting Technology for Products and Environments. It is a wide-ranging survey of works that use new and emerging digital technologies, often crossed with physical interactions and products that blur the boundaries between art and design. They have managed to collect together work from a fantastic range of contributors, including my mates over at Hulger.

I visited Troika a while back and interviewed for a Podcast on Core77 and really like their approach to what they do and they’re lovely people too.

I plan to review Digital by Design for the soon-to-be-launched Designers Review of Books, but in the meantime you can buy it from Amazon.co.uk here (or Amazon.com here).

I also wrote a profile on them in my Foreign Policy column for Desktop. It seemed a fitting time for another “From the Archives” interview post. You can read the full Desktop article after the jump…

Troika – Good things come in threes

Creating an original visual language in the digital age should be easy, but when we all use the same tools, sometimes everything looks the same. Troika are a multi-disciplinary art and design practice based in London who unusually work across graphic design, motion graphics, interactivity as well as engineering, art and sculpture. Their work constantly explores new aesthetics through innovative technological approaches.

The practice was founded in 2003 by Conny Freyer, Eva Rucki and Sebastien Noel, all of whom met at the Royal College of Art, and is perhaps most well-known for their recent work on British Airways’ new Terminal 5 at Heathrow. Although the opening of the terminal itself has been beset by organisational disasters — with baggage going astray and passengers stranded — Troika’s Cloud and All The Time In The World installations have at least given travellers something to marvel at whilst they wait.

The cross-disciplinary nature of the practice came about through a mixture of friendship and being in the right place, says Noel. “The Royal College is known for encouraging those kinds of discussions between disciplines. Like any university it’s like a playground where you meet people and you can exchange ideas between architects, designers, all sorts of people.”
The combination of technical knowledge and creative approach go hand in hand, adds Rucki. “I think you grow your work within certain boundaries and our work has always been about how far we can push the boundaries, what we can get away with within that.”

Photo © Alex Delfanne/Artwise Curators 2008

All The Time In The World is a 22-metre long wall at the entrance to the First Class and Concorde Galleries lounges in Terminal 5. Instead of the obvious world-clock locations such as Paris, London, New York, Troika wanted to give a sense of more exotic places in the world — natural wonders such as the Great Barrier Reef or Mount Whitney — bringing some romance back to travel.

“Everything is grouped by the typology of places, like the highest mountains or biggest lakes,” explains Noel. “There’s even a stupid one that we came up with that began with Philadelphia, then it goes Corfu, Gouda, Roquefort — all the places where cheeses are made.”

The piece uses electroluminescent ink silk-screened onto a flexible transparent acetate and displayed behind a deep-blue glass wall. Although this technology has been around for a few years, Troika took it a step further by developing and patenting an approach that divided up the type into segments, each individually addressable and able to display different up to five different typefaces. The visible, glowing circuit is combined with the letters being animated by switching on the segments as if they are being drawn by an invisible hand. The result is a unique visual aesthetic, developed from the technical challenges as much as the creative approach.

“It’s not even so much the silk-screening process that is a challenge. It’s more about how many circuits you can use and how refined you can then get the typeface. The typeface is built out of 67 circuits, or segments, for each letter. The letters appear by switching on different combinations of the segments within that cell. So the more segments you have the more refined the typeface can be, but also the more complicated the driving technology has to be, which we’re obviously trying to minimise,” says Rucki.

Photo © Alex Delfanne/Artwise Curators 2008

They faced a similar aesthetic and technical challenge with their work on Cloud, a five-metre long kinetic sculpture suspended above the atrium hall in Terminal 5 representing the transition from the earth to the sky when flying. The sculpture has an S-shape with a pillow-like profile – an organic shape full of compound curves covered with over 4,638 flip-dots. Whilst the curves give a sense of natural form, it provided a fair few production headaches in order to work out how to evenly tile the two-inch dots over the surface.

The electro-mechanical flip-dots were used because of their history of use on old departure and arrival displays and their analogue charm. “We originally conceived of a structure with a sea of flip dots. They have this real materiality and make a distinctive ‘clak, clak, clak!’ sound. When I close my eyes and imagine myself as a child going somewhere, this noise is always in the background,” says Noel.

Troika had to persuade the manufacturer of the dots to make custom ones in order to be able to use the dots hanging upside-down or horizontally. The controllers of the dots themselves also use an old 1970s technology combined with modern circuits, which meant very specific cabling throughout the sculpture — the innards are stuffed with circuit boards and over 5km of cabling.

Finally, having built this new display form, Troika had a chance to play with it and develop the aesthetic language. To help them with this process they built a 3D-model in Processing in order to work out the patterns to display on the Cloud.

“It’s very difficult to imagine how you are going to animate something that’s like a screen but three-dimensional and non-regular,” he says. “There is no regular alignment, no grid system. So we work with a kind of peeled-out version of the cloud, like a two-dimensional map of the cloud and then the control software makes the relationship between the colour of the pixel and the dot on the physical object. Plus you have a lot of other things you have to think about that you don’t have on a normal screen — the time it takes a dot to flip, the sound it makes, all these different variables. You have to find the language of the medium.”

We are all so used to working digitally with hundreds of typefaces on demand and almost infinite choice, that those of us who aren’t typographers forget what a challenge it is to not only create the design, but also the tools and the mechanism for displaying it. We can all learn something from this 21st century equivalent of creating your own quills and inks.

This article originally appeared in Desktop Magazine – July 2008 Issue 240 it is not covered by Playpen’s general Creative Commons Licence and is ©2008 Andy Polaine

The current issue of Desktop has a snippet from my interview with Dav Mrozek Rauch from The Orphanage talking about their work on the HUD for Iron Man. If you click on video and then “Run Before You Can Walk” in the widget above, you’ll get a reasonable taster of it.

One of my favourite parts of chatting to him was hearing about the interaction design issues that came up in terms of the relationship between the suit known as Jarvis – the computer that Downey Jr.’s character, Tony Stark, interacts with – and Stark. For example, what should come first when his eyes look in a particular direction? Is he looking at something and then the HUD responds, or does the HUD show him something and he looks at it?

“We would just get these plates of him in front of a green screen and say, ‘Okay, now he’s looking to the left, what should he be looking at on the HUD? Put something cool in.’ But no matter how cool the thing you put in it’s not going to look right or seem real unless you know what story it should be telling.”

“I asked John Favreau and he said, ‘He’s having a conversation with Jarvis, it depends on who’s asking the question’,” says Rauch.

“If Tony asks a question then Jarvis responds, if Tony is flying and he’s hit then Jarvis throws up some information and Tony looks at it. Once I started looking at the shots like that it became so obvious. What was really interesting for myself and the team is that we weren’t just making visual effects, we weren’t just doing design, we were filmmaking and we were making stories and doing it in a very collaborative way.”

It’s an interesting set of interaction issues to deal with and they’re only a tiny bit in the future. We’ve all seen disastrous versions of this with Microsoft’s Clippy, after all.

I also found the discussions they had about interface colours and design approaches insightful:

“Amber is kind of the 80s and cyan is the 90s, what’s the colour of the future going to look like? What’s the next iPhone or Motorola going to look like? We really had to pull out all the stops for the Mark II and then think about how to make things more simple for the Mark III, because that’s how design usually works. It’s starts out complex and then gets more simplified.”

In midst of the searching for the perfect user-experience I think we forget how influenced we are by fashions and also how fashions and Hollywood movies affect audiences’ and users’ mental schemas of interfaces – think Minority Report and multi-touch, for example.

In a few months I’ll be able to post the whole interview here – Dav also chatted about some of The Orphanage’s commercial animation work and their experiments with a kind of 2D/3D hybrid.

But for the moment go and buy a copy of Desktop!

Daniel Brown – Flower Power

(In an earlier unpublished draft of this I so wanted to title it “Dan Brown – The Da Vinci Coder”, but good taste prevailed. Now I get the chance to share the awful pun with the world. I still prefer it to ‘Flower Power’ though. – AP)

Some of the most successful people seem to thrive between the cracks of definition. The lack of a clear pigeonhole allows for interesting combinations of skills that pique the interest of those in overlapping disciplines. Daniel Brown, winner of the London Design Museum’s coveted Designer of the Year Award in 2004 is one such chameleon. He won the award for his web design when, by his own admission, he’s not really a web designer and would be considered more of an artist by many.

There is a mix of genetics and good fortune at play in Brown’s past. His father, Paul Brown, produced Europe’s first piece of computer animation for television way back in 1981. Like many of us that have ended up experimenting with interactive media, he had a home computer (a Commodore Vic 20 with 3k of memory) when he was very young. Early Hypermedia pioneer and family friend, Roy Stringer, invited Brown to experiment on his office’s Apple Macintosh in 1991 (it was worth $10,000 back then).

Brown joined Stringer’s company in 1996 and started working on research there. Long before the likes of Joshua Davis’s Praystation, Brown was publishing his experimental work on his micro-site, Noodlebox. Some of the works were simple experiments in generative graphics, others explored ideas of interaction. Using Macromedia Director and its Shockwave plug-in, Brown brought life to the web and Noodlebox’s popularity unexpectedly soared.

“I thought at the time it would be well received in the web design community,” says Brown. “But what I never expected was how well it would be recognised in the design/media/advertising community generally, and even in the public. Nor how long it would live. It probably had the height of its popularity about 2000/2001, almost five years after it was made, and still accounts for a large amount of requests to my site.”

Brown is now working with renowned fashion photographer and image-maker, Nick Knight at his experimental cross-media workshop SHOWstudio in London. The fashion world and the projects have helped him come to terms with the thorny question of whether he is a designer, artist, engineer or all three.

“It is the old ‘engineering, design, crafts, applied arts, arts’ question I think. I would have had a much harder time answering this question ten years ago than I do now. And that’s partly due to having worked alongside the fashion industry for the last few years. The so-called ‘traditional’ view of a designer is probably more akin to an ‘engineer’ and that designing is completing a brief to the best quality at the cheapest cost. But we’re living in a Post-Modern society, where the mere fact that something was designed by a particular designer makes it more valuable. Branding and fashion have permeated the process itself. It’s easiest to see this in the fashion industry. Sure, some designers choose cost or technical innovation as their focus, others glamour and beauty. But one thing holds them together as designers – money, or more specifically, demand. And that’s why a fashion designer is not an artist.”

Winning Designer of the Year was very special for Brown. Not only was he following in the footsteps of Apple’s legendary vice-president of industrial design, Jonathan Ive, but it also came shortly after a swimming accident that left him paralysed from the shoulders down. It is gratifying to see the award go to designers who are willing to experiment and it also recognises the influence they have had over others. “I was flattered that web-design won full stop – I thought it was a great thing for the industry,” was his typically modest response.

Although much of his upcoming work is under wraps, a recent favourite was his collaboration with Nick Knight on Dazed and Confused’s 10th birthday issue. “[Nick] had a huge amount to do in a short space of time – and he remembered a prototype tool I had shown him,” he explains. “Basically it was like a scratch-card, each time you ‘drew’ with the mouse you were revealing another random image. So he photographed all the models wearing clothes from the last ten years, all in the same ‘pose’. We then fed them into the software, and Nick produced these realtime photomontages. The end result was fantastic, and to boot we put the tool on SHOWstudio – so people could use the actual software/images.”   The other project that has been absorbing Brown’s spare time is his generative flowers series on his Play/Create site. They are based on the “mathematics of nature” and are constantly evolving works, stemming from the early days of Noodlebox. “I’m up to about the eighth piece in the series, and yet I can still sit and stare at one of them for hours. They simply never get boring. And they’re selling well as private commissions to art buyers, which makes me happy.”

Anyone that has tried to exhibit a piece of interactivity will know the pain of watching people not “get it” and wander off disappointed. It is something that Brown is keenly aware of and it is guiding his future work. “The piece has to become apparent in less than about ten seconds,” he says of gallery works. “This is what interests me now. The idea behind Play/Create is very much ‘interactive music videos’ and as such the pieces have to be simple, and they have to be engaging. They’ve got to be as instinctive as listening to music, simply moving the mouse has to produce an elegant reaction if that’s all the user wants to do.”

This simplicity of engagement is something that often gets overlooked in the technology lead world of new media and it is often undervalued by the art world because it is so afraid of seeming trivial. But when you watch people in a gallery, they quite often spend less than ten seconds in front of a Picasso.

The mobile sphere is the obvious venue for future experiments. “[The] problem is that a lot of fashion people don’t do ‘computers’ so we’re looking at what kind of platform on mobile we could come up with that is more ‘visual’ more ‘fluid’ more ‘check this out’ when people are in a bar say. You know, what will people be using their games consoles for when everyone - including granny – has one? What will be interactive entertainment as opposed to games? This is what I’m thinking about.” In the meantime he will carry on playing and creating.

This article first appeared in the June 2005 issue of Desktop magazine. It is expressly not covered by Playpen’s general Creative Commons licence and is ©2005 Andy Polaine.