MEMEX: A brief history of collective intelligence and social media
“When your brand is being blogged?” Panel Discussion, Extending Your Brand
To Your Employees, Conference Board, Chicago, November 13, 2007
Ancient projects recovered deep from within the archive that exemplify primitive pre-millenial media experiments and tendencies (ie. very early abuses of Flash, rollovers, popups, meta-refresh, RealPlayer, and other flagrant web design sins.)
School of Art, Media & Technology
Parsons the New School for Design
New York, NY 10011
212 229 8908 x4092
email: last name plus first initial at newschool dot edu
Recent Course
Interaction: Core Studio
Fall 2009, BFA Design & Technology
This
course is an intensive project-based studio, focusing of the principles
and elements of interactive and online media. Students will produce
projects with increasing complexity, focusing on historic precedents,
information architecture, media integration and future developments.
Emphasis is on a critical awareness of new technologies, an articulated
design process, creative engagement with the medium and principles of
user experience.
Center for Mobile Creativity and Nokia Research Center, Palo Alto
Offered by the Center for Mobile Creativity at Parsons School of Art, Media and Technology. Sponsored by Nokia Research Center, Palo Alto. Two $2,500 Fellowships are offered for the Spring 2010 semester to qualifying BFA or MFA degree candidates enrolled in the Parsons Design + Technology, Communication Design, Photography, or other relevant program. The Fellowship will also include funded travel to Nokia Research Center, Palo Alto to present outcomes to sponsoring researchers. Devices and pre-paid GSM services will also be provided to Fellowship recipients.
The editable textfield above is a live and persistant real-time-multi-user shared object.
Summer Program
Mobile Quest Summer Camp 2009
In association with the Pearson Foundation, the Nokia Mobile Learning Institute, the Institute of Play and the Center for Transformative Media, the Center for Mobile Creativity supported the development of a groundbreaking summer camp curriculum on smartphone enabled game design for 5th graders. We helped develop the three core mobile games that formed the basis of the camp's curriculum. The games we designed with Institute of Play and Parsons graduate student game designers featured mechanics that exploited mobile locativity, mobile barcodes and Bluetooth file sharing. My segments can found between 3:16 - 5:35 in the video.
Paper on “1000 Cell Phones” to be published in the ICOGRADA 2009 World Design Congress Educator Network proceedings
ICOGRADA, The International Council of Graphic Design Associations, will host its annual World Design Congress 2009 in Beijing, between October 24-30. The paper on «1000 Cell Phones» submitted to the conference was co-authored by David Carroll and Huang Haiyan. Submitted in English and Chinese versions, the paper narrates the project’s creation and purpose as a case-study in international art and design education collaboration models. Furthermore, the essence of the project resonates with the World Design Congress theme of xin 信 which signifies human speaking, message, letter, communication. When xin 信 is combined with other ideographs further meanings include:
Xin-xi (Information) - human communication
Xin-nian (Vision) - designing a better world
Xin-ren (Trust) - understanding and collaboration
Xin-yong (Credibility) - reliability and responsibility
Xin-xin (Faith) - believing in hope
We submitted it bi-lingually in the spirit of these principles as a shared expression of multi-linguality.
David Carroll, Benjamin Bacon, Sven Travis and Haiyan Huang with students and faculty from Parsons (New York), Academy of Arts and Design, Tsinghua (Beijing)
USA and China, 2008, mobile media installation
Visualizing Invisible Identities
Emerging out of an institutional collaboration between Parsons The New School for Design (New York City) and the Academy of Arts and Design at Tsinghua University (Beijing), the interactive artwork, 1000 Cell Phones, exposes the invisible conversation that constantly occurs between the networked devices we carry throughout our nomadic urban daily life.
The installation consists of multiple displays that playfully visualize and animate discovered Bluetooth devices within its situated space. Devices are represented as abstract discs in dimensional screen space, colored by transcribing the devices’ unique identifiers (MAC address) to distinctive colors (RGB HEX value). This simple but evocative effect emphasizes how an ID number expressed as a one-of-a-kind color not only makes visible a distinguishing feature of our portable networked device, but also reshapes its obfuscated technical datum into an aesthetic and coherent design object. It asks us if this machine identifier expresses our persona and personality, perhaps without our knowledge and complete understanding of the implications.
In addition, discovered device names animate across the screens, emphasizing the transient nature of the tracking devices we carry, unwittingly broadcasting a unique identifier for anyone or anything willing to listen. In most cases, these names are the default brand and model of the mobile device, but many users customize their device name to a moniker even more revealing and interesting to contribute towards the installation. By installing the artwork in a social space, such as a café or lobby, 1000 Cell Phones captures the unseen dialogue between mobile phones and laptops broadcasting their Bluetooth identities while owners lurk and socialize. When participants realize how their device names render on the displays, they often engage in the intervention by altering their settings to affect the textual content on the visualization. In these moments, the conversations between the invisible and visible, technical and aesthetic, surveillance and dissemination, machines and people all become intertwined in a simple but enjoyable expression.
The mobile media installation, 1000 Cell Phones, developed out of a collaborative partnership between MFA and BFA Design & Technology faculty and students at Parsons The New School for Design and Information Design graduate and undergraduate faculty and students at the Academy of Arts and Design at Tsinghua University. The Parsons team, led by David Carroll, designed the initial concept of the artwork and built the core custom software tools, including the Bluetooth scanner, device database server and Flash visualization engine, in New York, before visiting Tsinghua in late May 2008. Then, in close collaboration with Tsinghua academy faculty and students, the artwork was completed and refined for its debut in Beijing. Indeed, Parsons and Tsinghua faculty and students co-authored certain crucial aspects of the visualization and interaction software code.
1000 Cell Phones debuted at Synthetic Times 2008, National Art Museum of China, on June 6 through July 3, 2008 as part of the international new media art exhibition and Beijing Olympics Culture Project.
First-year, first-semester Communication Design & Technology students introduced to compuation and creativity through Processing and simple Object Oriented Programming for visual design.
The projects on this video represent a few breakthrough experiments by first-year Design & Technology students created during their studio the Fall of 2007. This studio introduced the practice of programming at the service of visual art and design. Studying Processing as a sofware medium, these students were assigned the task of creating an object oriented interactive sketch based on particle systems, an elaboration of an in-class exercise, or an implementation of an open source based code library. As an initiation into the school of thought that software is a design medium unto itself, rather than a mere design tool, these freshmen enjoyed epiphanies, some emblematized here. Although simple and compact, these projects reveal how the class of 2011 absorbs and embraces the spirit of the Parsons Communications Design & Technology program. By harnessing basic cursor gestures, graceful key-clicks, or generative algorithms, aesthetically pure pixels dance, flutter, and mimic natural dynamics. These explorations represent only the initial birth of design futurists. Consider the expectations of graduating into the next decade.
“Muzzi” - the interactive pet and music player hybrid
Woody Kwon, BFA Design + Technology, Class of 2007
This video clip demonstrates the concept behind Muzzi, the interactive pet and music player hybrid. As the mobile user plays music, the pet not only dances and performs the music through sound analysis, but also absorbs the qualities of the musical genre as it grows, over listening time. The Muzzi product also offers customization capabilties where owners earn new clothing and accessories for their music player pets. In addition, the mobile device software features a dancing game inspired by music-matching interactions such as Dance Dance Revolution or Guitar Hero, adapted for the mobile interface and the Muzzi concept. This project was developed for Flash Lite and prototypes run on a Nokia N80.
Somewhere between a web-enabled pocket semantic notebook and a mobile social bookmarking community, Info Wraps prototypes the concept of consuming and occasionally recording small units of information, tagged for easy recall. The concept envisages an interactive tag cloud that enables associative meme storage by arranging terms in meaningful proximities. The directional and numeric pads are used to pan through tag clouds and jump to clusters, respectively.
In addition, a user's memes would be cross-referenced on a z-axis, so one could delve into a social web of interconnections.
Video clip demonstrates a working prototype in Flash Lite that provides a mobile interface for the del.icio.us API via a custom server interface.
My students competed in the Forum Nokia Mobile Game Competition for University Students, one team winning an overall prize for best overall game. All finalists from Parsons received new Nokia N82 and E71 mobile phones as prizes. The winning team was sent sent all-expenses-paid, to the Game Developer's Conference 2009 in San Francisco and presented and demonstrated their winning game Weekness.
Weekness makes guessing games out of outgoing text messages between you and your friends. You try to guess each other's 'weakness' word for that week and correctly match them to top-ten frequent word lists. It ingeniously exploits the upcoming Nokia Simple Context Service and is available for the Nokia E71 and built with the Flash Lite Distributable Player.
mercurious — my rants
delicious — my bookmarks
last.fm — my music
linkedin — my colleagues
facebook — my friends
twitter — my status
1000 Cell Phones,
