summ( )n

This image is from the exhibition called Liberation of Light, currently held in the Design House of Eindhoven (and also a part of the Dutch Design Week); but I came to the place not so much to see the exhibition, but mainly to participate in the Caviar Rouge Forum, titled Design Minded. The forum, one of the pivotal moments of the week-long Caviar Rouge Project, was aimed at exploring the issues of cultural dependencies of design (and in turn, its its impact on cultures of societies).

The forum was greeted by the current head of the Design House who pointed to the rapidly changing technologies behind many of the lighting solutions, moving from the incandescent light bulbs to LEDs, OLEDs, and many more novel exciting technologies, that force design (and societies at large) to rethink the way we create and use light in our lives.

Gus Rodriguez, former vice-president of Philips Design, presented a wide historical panorama of design evolution, and its links with societal and cultural developments, and suggested to think about new role of design, capable to both address and solve deep and urgent issues of the present moment.

The second speaker, Alexander Leenetsky from Russia, vice-president of the Design Union and the chief editor of the design-union.ru portal, talked about various cases of the use (and abuse) of design in Russia when dealing with specific cultural issues (ranging from more traditional product design to communication and up to conceptual design thinking).

Two speeches had been followed by a panel discussion, moderated by Joris van Gelder (Dutch designers and a head of Ministerie of Nieuwe Dingen agency) and Ivan Paschenko from the Storytelling Company. Among the panelists were Aigul Baigozhaeva, head designer of Astana, the capital of Kazakhstan, Wouter van Nieuwland, from the newly established Eindhoven Design agency, and Artemy Lebedev from Art.Lebedev studio in Russia.

A short, but a very interesting performance by Olimdjon Beknazarov opened the Caviar Rouge Project, part of the Dutch Design Week. The artist has combined seemingly uncombinable cultural traditions, blending the Japanese costumes, Christian music and Arabic body language in one impressive dance performance. And, as if it was not diverse enough a cultural cocktail, the performance was happening around a beautiful lighting installation by Chinese (!) artist Li Hui in the Dutch (!!) Museum of Artificial Light in Art (Centrum voor Kunstlicht in de Kunst) in Eindhoven. It surely symbolizes.

The atmosphere of the event was very creative, and very rouge too, because of the mesmerizing beams of red light of the Li Hui’s masterpiece installation called Reincarnation:

The red hue also made very difficult to take good pictures, and I failed to produce anything remotely publishable at the end But I feel I need to post at least two pictures, of Yelena Kharitonova, the founder, organizer, and key driver of the project, and of Peter Nagelkerke, a newly appointed Ambassador of Caviar Rouge in the Netherlands. Kudos to Yelena, and best luck for the coming week!

Genrich Altshuller, the author of the TRIZ approach to innovation, once gave a definition of ‘ideal solution’ of any problem. He wrote that “the ideal solution should solve the initial problem, but has to ceased to exist itself [thus avoiding creation of the subsequent problems"]. He also gave an example of such ‘ideal solution’: the door that opens when someone approaches it, let him go through, but then becomes a wall again, ‘ceasing to exist’ as a door. The picture above, of the hanging threads, may be a good approximation of such an ‘ideal door’ (although not a precise model of it, of course).

Psychotherapists are often seen as a ‘solution providers’ by their clients; wrongly, I think, because a psychotherapist should not provide a ‘solution’ to the patient’s problem (he doesn’t ‘have’ it in a first place); instead, what he can hope to do is to create the conditions, space and enablers that would help people to find the solutions for themselves. Whether the therapist is seen as a direct agent of change or a facilitator only, the memory about the act of therapy is an interesting topic to consider. If the patient remembers a ‘helping hand’ of the therapist, was it a successful therapy?

My mentor was often saying the first accidental after-therapy encounter with the client is a good indicator of its success: “If we meet on a street some time after we finished our sessions, and my former client runs to me with the words of gratitude and applications, I always feel it’s my failure as a therapist. I would much prefer they wouldn’t notice me, wouldn’t even recognize me, as if we didn’t have our sessions at all”.

The therapy would work in this case, but the therapeutic agent ceased to exist, at least it is erased from the memory. (By the way, I often compare the work we do at Summ()n with psychotherapy, a futuretherapy of some sort; we don’t bring the ‘future solutions” to our clients, instead we help them to change their way of thinking about the future so that they could produce their own new ideas and ‘possible futures’).

I’ve recently encountered a very interesting book, Effortless Action: Wu-wei As Conceptual Metaphor and Spiritual Ideal in Early China. The author, Edward Slingerland, argues that the usual understanding the famous Daoist concept of wu-wei as ‘non-action’ is not very accurate, and that we instead have to read it as ‘effortless action’. The action happens, the result is achieved, and yet somehow no special energy/effort/device was needed.

He writes on how important, and omnipresent was this concept in the early Chinese thought, and how difficult it is to grasp this ideas for the Western way of thinking, focussed on the tool/technique, and on the author/hero (and now, the designer).

Where do all these three above snippets point to? In the spirit of this posting, and also following my own pi-approach to the story-telling, I won’t tell you, but rather invite you to explore the void of this conceptual donut yourself

ps: I can only add that I am writing this posting on the very day of the Dutch Design Week‘s opening in Eindhoven, with the largest program ever, that also includes the first wdf, “World Design Forum“. I can’t imagine they will be promoting ‘designless design‘ there

Yay, there is a chance we will be playing /acting out our Internet of Dragons game again, this time in Paris, during the conference on de l’internet des objects. Need to rehearse my French, un peu

Today I discovered the works by British artist and designer Bruce Munro, amazing lighting installations, almost heavenly looking. He was nominated to the Artist of the Day, by the same name web service, but for another project (also very nice, but.. differently nice). Then I went to his own website, and oh, wow, how amazing his light worlds are! Someone wrote in the comments to the videos on Youtube, “but that’s Avatar for real!” I agree, the experience of being *in* these worlds should be very elevating.

That’s how I imaging some of the Summ()n’s worlds: totally fantastic, and yet deeply human, resonating with us on some sort of archetypical level. I do recommend to have a look a the videos of these wonderful creations.

At the end of November Eindhoven will host STRP, a large festival of art and technology. The program of the event is rich and full of demonstrations, performances, concerts and shows. But it also have its’s own ‘scientific’ part, a conference called “e-Sphere: Living in a Cloud“. I am invited to moderate one of the workshop of this event, on the Internet of Things and its social and cultural impact (beyond its mere technological features). I expect both interesting talks (the list of speaker is very impressive) and hot debates (also because some of the speakers hold quite opposing views on the matter).

If anyone will have a chance to come to the festival, do joint the conference too, it will be on Friday, November 26.

Presentation by Mitchell Joachim at PICNIC’10 was perhaps the most ‘futuristic’ of all; his famous characteristic visualizations always help in conveying the theme of the possible futures very vividly and powerfully. Just look at the pictures above: flying cars, self-growing homes, a distinctive organotechnological look&feel of his imaginary worlds, what else can you wish from the ‘visions of the futures’?

For those who wasn’t familiar with the ideas of Joachim, a visionary architect and a founder of the Terreform , his talk could be a mind-blower. For those already familiar – and Mitchell is a frequent speaker at various conference, presenter at TED, and his images have been used as cover pages of many magazines, including as by Popular Science most recently – there was hardly anything new said. I put a few slides from his talk to the set in Flickr (Future City Mobility), and as one can see, all the imagery used has been is already widely circulated on the web (that’s not a critique at all, the talks was nevertheless very interesting).

For me personally the most interesting part was in the twist he made in the last few slides, when he start talking about an ‘organ architecture’; such as an imaginary Meat House (see below). This was a bit off track of the topic ‘mobility’, and more in line with his interest to everything living.

The image (and the very concept, of the tissue-like materials to be used in the future) reminded me the year 1999, when I just joined Philips Design as a trend researcher. I remember that one of the first ideas I tried to bring to the team discussion was of organic, ‘living’ materials; a table or a chair one would ‘grow’, not design. I argued that we need to explore this topic more, and specifically the new dimensions of perception of such ‘living materials’ by people, including all the ethical and aesthetic dimensions. To my disappointment, the topic wasn’t picked up at all, the materials used by Philips then were miles away from the organic, living one (they still are, even now). Oh, well, the future is not distributed evenly, as we know.

The lecture by David Gallo, oceanographer from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution was one of the most emotionally charged. He a a media start at the moment, because of his expedition to the Titanic wreck site that he and his team accurately surveyed for the first time in history. But besides this sparkles of fame, David spent 30+ years of his life researching our underwater planet.

Captain Cousteau was a hero of my childhood, and similar to many people my generation I adored the images and later the films from various underwater expeditions, of him and of his multiple followers; I would even consider myself somewhat knowledgeable about the matter. So it of course comes as a great shock when you realizes that we sill know more about the back side of the Moon that about the oceans of our planet. Less than five percent of the ocean bedrock is explored; every underwater expedition equipped with proper tools discovers dozens (!) new species, including previously unthinkable. And yet the funds allocated to the space research is many times more the ones for oceanography. We still understand very little about how oceans ‘work’, but without much hesitation intrude with our technological and economic activities.

The green dots are the lights of the fishing boats densely wrapping up Japan; they put powerful lamps under water, to attract tune, so this greenish hue. On the other side, we can launch the Mars Rover ( 55 million km of deep space) , but can’t efficiently fix the oil spill on the bottom of the Mexican Gulf (2.5 km of water).

And by the way, there is not so much of this liquid matter with us:

So, all in all, we better care. But we don’t.

I already wrote here about the wonderful techno-organic creations by Philip Beesley, artist and architect from Canada. We saw them last year in Linz, during the Ars Electronica festival. They are truly amazing, and somewhat terrifying too, I remember seeing people who were scary to get into these translucent, vibrating thickets.

I am not sure that the lecture alone, even is presented by the author of these ‘creatures’, is capable to convey the whole experience. But for me, who did have the first-hand expereince of Hylozoic Grove, it was very interesting. I can’t say that I buy everything that Philip was trying to explain about the roots and the origin of the idea, some parts of his story looked like a backward rationalization. Bit that doesn’t matter, it was a real pleasure to see more, and more diverse reincarnations of this idea.

For me his ‘hylozoic spaces’ come most close to the Summ()n’s transformative environments, as I imagine them; minus the hylozoism itself, of course. Few more of his slides can be seen in a small set on Flickr.

The PICNIC’s speakers are usually of a superb quality, both content-wise and charisma-wise. It is the major regret that you can not listen to all of them, there are too many parallel tracks. I will tell here only about a few presentations, not necessarily because they were ‘the best’, but because they resonated with my, or Simm()n’s interests. This one was by Steve Hayden, Chief Creative Officer, Ogilvy & Mather. In fact, his entire presentation was about one small tool he apparently invented, modestly called Steve’a Mandala:

I have somewhat nostalgic feeling about everything ‘mandala’; one of my first online innovation workshops happened to end up with the concept we called ‘manadalizer’ (a great concept, by the way), so since then I have an emotional anchor set. As with every mandala, this one was capable to explain everything, if not in the world at large, then at least in the corporate world.

Where everything starts with Fear, according to Steve. Not Visions, Missions, Brand Values and other hollow words motivate people, no-no. Fear. That causes Arousal. That in turns wakes up Intelligence. Which quickly leads to Arrogance (I didn’t quite the Intelligent Fear stage; nor I got the other stages, but I remember that the end was Bad).

As every gross-simplification, the model worked magically when Steven himself played with it on the scene, and became hugely problematic as soon as you get a chance to think. But it was a great show, no doubts. And – we got the mandalas too, a nice memory token of the event.