Blog Archive for Month: June 2007

I found this billboard at the central station Linz, Austria yesterday.
Hmm … all mac user won’t understand what’s going on here but the designer of this Tirol ad was working on Windows XP, that’s for sure. Probably he ran out of ideas and decided to design the campaign on the default screen wallpaper of the Windows XP desktop.
I wonder how many people on earth looking at these microsoft hills every day? Hmm …

New Project!

I should organize a group travel to Napa Valley to see the XP Desktop with my own eyes. Who wants to join?

Oh, look at that guy. Such a nerd….

What? That’s me?…
Yes, right there is my name on the badge.
Ups…

I found this pic today on bub.licio.us
on an post by Stephanie Booth.

The badges at the Reboot 9.0 Conference were great. The font size was so big that you could read anybodys name from far away. And everybody did, you could tell. (just came back from Freiburg Designforum, which was nice but the badges were tiny and single sided, wrong side points to the front all the time)
To walk around your own name at this size is almost like walking your name under WoW conditions. Privacy becomes public.
(and is the enemy of social software/web2.0)

On sunday I will have a talk about my work at Designforum Freiburg. “Open Source” is the title of the two day conference on design. The dicussion is not limited to software development but relates to the change OS evokes in terms of economics and shared knowledge.

Program and Speakers.

“Open Source, bekannt als Begriff aus der Softwareentwicklung, beschreibt weniger nur eine technische Besonderheit als vielmehr ein soziales und wirtschaftliches Phänomen des Internet-Zeitalters. Open Source steht für freies und gemeinschaftliches Entwickeln und Gestalten an einem Produkt, das von vornherein als Eigentum der Allgemeinheit begriffen wird…”

Like on the web links don’t last for every. This plazemark I did in autum in Berlin is still kind of visible. But of course it won’t work with a mobile anymore. I like the fade out.

I talked a lot of my Tree project. Yes, it will happend sometime in autum after Ars Electronica.
This pic shows another very beautiful urban tree 🙂 provided by Tobias. Nice shot!

Being busy with my new project Google Portrait Series I found this nice drawing by MIT student Ben Dalton who did an analysis on portraiture in general and related to internet development.

“I decided to produce a portrait sketch based on a google search. Google only provides an outline of an individual if their name is very well know on the web, or it is unusual. I chose the ‘guru’ and web celebrity Jacob Nielsen, who’s website useit.com provides his thoughts on design and usability.

In searching for someone’s name, text that uses the persons full name is retrieved. This tends to result in formal descriptuions of the individual. I wanted to contrast a style that used distraction and detail with the stark refined simplicity of google and Jacob’s own design style.

By picking out words, and reforming them into my own phrases I have tried to alter the meaning of the search results to reflect my own interpretations and bias. This form of artistic sketching and wordplay has been explored by an artist who took a whole book, drew on each page (highlighting new phrases to produce a new narrative), and republishing the book (Unfortunately I cannot remember the details of this project to link to it).

Below is the final sketch. i couldn’t help putting a recognisable face in there (after much debate). I think it would be enhanced with the addition of colour wash, coffee cup stains or colour pencil marks.”

Finally I have this new project online. I am using the same technique as in the Tagging project but on a different and very appropriate topic.

“A Google Portrait is an interactive painting which contains the Google search string of the portrayed person in encoded form. Every java enabled camera phone is capable to decode the “Semacode” called 2D-code by taking a picture of the portrait. The result leads the mobile phone browser to Google doing a search on the portrayed person’s name…”

read on at project page Google Portrait Series

Thx to Daniel, my first victim. 😉

Holger sitting next room asked me for help today because he couldn’t find the mobile phone which was constantly making that typical connection noise on his iBook speakers. Of course he already tried to get rid of that sound by shutting off his mobile which didn’t help. I even suspected his mobile to be in stealth mode.

The solution was really simple. He had my thesis website datenamort.de open. LOL.

(My own stuff keeps tricking me, a good sign.)

3D Graffiti is a project of Raplaa Lazarno of LOL Architects Production of Architecture – Unreal Central Perspective 2006 – Royal Institute of Technology Stockholm.
Very nice concept of adding “elegally” objects to builings in Second Life.

via Tao Takeshi/Mrtopf