Nowcasting: Design Theory+Digital Humanities

http://www.dma.ucla.edu/nowcasting/

NOWCASTING is the first conference to apply design theory to emerging issues in the digital humanities. Showcasing digital humanities projects at every level from Google mapping to super computing visualization, the Nowcasting seminar proposes that learning from communication design, interaction design, and industrial design will be vital to 21st century humanistic inquiry.

October 16 & 17, 2009 @ UCLA. The Nowcasting Seminar is organized by Peter Lunenfeld + sponsored by University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI), UCLA Design|Media Arts ,Digital Humanities + Media Study

Digital Humanities Talk

Info-Triage and Sticky Media: A seminar exploring the relevance of contemporary theories of design to the overall project of the Digital Humanities. UCLA Mellon Seminar in Digital Humanities, 2-5 April 6, 2009 in the Visualization Portal (5628 Math Sciences Building) and in Second Life on the Digital Library Federation island, Entropia. http://www.digitalhumanities.ucla.edu/

Winter Quarter DMA Courses

Winter quarter of 2009, I’m teaching two courses at UCLA: a grad seminar on Writing as Making and an undergraduate lecture on design and society I’m calling Nowcasting.

Westwood Ho!

I’m off to Westwood to join the UCLA Design | Media Arts department in September of 2008.

Holy Fire in Brussels

There’s an interesting new show going up in Brussels inspired by one of Bruce Sterling’s novels. “Holy Fire, Art of the Digital Age”, is at iMAL, Center for Digital Cultures and Technology from the 18th-30th of April. It features Cory Arcangel (USA), Vuk Cosic (SLO), Shane Hope (USA), Jodi (BE/NL), Lab[au] (BE), Joan Leandre (SP), Olia Lialina & Dragan Espenschied (RU/DE), Golan Levin (USA),Mark Napier (USA), Casey Reas (USA), Charles Sandison (UK/FI), Antoine Schmitt (FR), Yacine Sebti (BE), Alexei Shulgin & Aristarkh Chernyshev (RU), John F. Simon, Jr. (USA), Paul Slocum (USA), Wolfgang Staehle (USA), Eddo Stern (USA), Ubermorgen.com (AT), Carlo Zanni (IT) among others.

Jan Chipchase in the NYT

In February, our Bespoke Futures seminar did a workshop with Nokia’s design anthropologist Jan Chipchase. His work with global, low income communities and ITC development, including cell phone banking was covered in depth this weekend in the New York Times Sunday Magazine.

Pecha Kucha from Da Fucha 4/11/08

As their final in Design Dialogues, 1st year MDP students will do a pecha kucha in which they envision themselves five to seven years out of graduate school, coming back to do a presentation at Art Center. This is a prospective exercise in retrospective path finding. As Oscar-nominated editor Sally Menke discussed in Design Dialogues in the Fall of ‘07, one can only craft the narrative of a career in reverse, picking out signposts in the rear view mirror. This assignment, which might also be tited “Pech Fucha,” also serves as a place to examine the issue of ambition: How does a creative person think past the defaults of design authorship, commercial celebrity, and avant-garde autonomy?

Rick Vermeulen @ Design Dialogues 4/4/08

Rick Vermeulen is one of the most influential designers coming out of the Netherlands in the past quarter century. From 1978-82, Vermeulen was an editor of Hard Werken magazine, which made a considerable national impact and the group became a design studio operating under the name Hard Werken. In 1994, the company moved from Rotterdam to the Amsterdam area and amalgamated with the packaging design company Ten Cate Bergmans, subsequently changing its name to Inizio. In 1993, Vermeulen, a regular visitor to the United States, with teaching experience at Cranbrook, CalArts and North Carolina State University, moved to Los Angeles, where he took over the Hard Werken LA Desk for two years. Now back in Holland, he runs his own studio Via Vermeulen and works on projects for publishing and other clients.

Design Dialogues 3/14/08

This week, we are hosting Jason Tester, Research and Design Manager, The Institute for the Future. His interests in interactive technology began the old-fashioned way, tinkering one-on-one with the equipment he had at hand. With his work on technological voting, however, he saw the possible effects of computer-human interaction on the future of society as a whole. At IFTF, Jason focuses on three areas: research into how people use emerging technologies, the application of design to futures research, and facilitating groups to stimulate insights and implications about the future. Jason strives to look beneath the surface of society and its artifacts for hidden layers of meaning.

Software Studies

I’ll be participating in the inaugural Software Studies Workshop at UC San Diego, May 21 - Thu. May 22. This workshop has been organized by Lev Manovich, Director, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Associate Director, and Jeremy Douglass, Postdoctoral Researcher, Helena Bristow, Program Manager