On Wednesday, December 12, 2012, at Parson The New School Tishman Auditorium, Zach Lieberman, Carla Diana, and James Bridle shared their work and thoughts on how the new future of design is being imagined with today’s technology at the AIGA/NY The New Future of Design. Liz Danzico, co-founder and chair of the MFA Interaction Design program at the School of Visual Arts, moderated the event.

Liz Danzico began the talk with an open-ended question to the presenters: We were told the future of design was technology, which has since arrived. With the new possibilities, where do we go from here?

The speakers were introduced as poets. They were described as designers who use technology to affect our hearts and minds the same way a skilled poet uses words to do the same.

James Bridle, a technologist and publisher, aimed to turn the tables on the growing trend of precious materials being made digital, and to make the intangible tangible again. He stated that photographs, encyclopedias, and letters are becoming part of the digital world faster than ever. Bridle displayed a series of encyclopedias he created that chronicled the Iraq War to date. His only resource was Wikipedia. The series documented opinions, facts, falsities, satire, and taunts related to the Iraq War from the past 11 years.

Drone Shadow, was another project presented by Bridle. Drone Shadow created 1:1 chalk outlines of Unmanned Aircraft Vehicles (UAV) drones on the pavement around the world. On his website, Bridle states that, “we all live under the shadow of the drone…the attitude they represent—of technology used for obscuration and violence—should concern us all.” Bridle’s work masterfully takes a problem, publishes it, and presents it as a conversation, rather than a solution.

Carla Diana was the second speaker. She discussed the unexplored field of artificial intelligence interacting with every day life. Her work with AI was done during her time as an Artist in Residence at the Museum of Art and Design where she had complete freedom in exploration. She talked about her work and its relationship to the Uncanny Valley, a graph that displays the relation between the familiarity with a robot and its level of human likeness, with the most uneasy reactions evoked from creations that are too life-like.

Diana’s approach in creating robotics falls into a category that rests on the plateau of what a pleasant experience requires before becoming too lifelike. A robot she helped create with Neato Robotics, recreates human gestures such as head nods and eye expressions. Additionally, the robot’s ears light up  to match the color seen by its eyes. She stated that her designs encourage the audience to fill in the blanks and become part of the experience rather than a passive observer.

Another project Diana shared was a vacuum that operates itself while learning the room layout. She found that people often named their vacuums and expressed forgiveness if the vacuum got stuck and anger if the vacuum knocked something over, creating a curious attachment of humanity to robotics.

The final speaker, Zach Lieberman, presented the ideas of human interaction and emotional fabrication. One of his projects included a typeface generated with a car and stunt driver. He pointed out most of what we create is dependent or reflective of the tools available to us, “first we shape the tools, then the tools shape us,” he said.

What tools are available to create type? What does type really require? As long as a form is created, “why not use a car and a camera strapped with tracking technology to create these forms?” he asked.

Lieberman beautifully illustrated how often we are reshaping our tools today with this display of typographic development. He displayed his solution to allow a street artist, Tempt, forced into hospitalization because of Lou Gehrig’s disease to start tagging again. Lou Gehrig’s disease, a form of ALS, rendered Tempt paralyzed, with the exception of limited facial mobility—most importantly the eyes. Lieberman’s creation used cheap sunglasses, a webcam, and pupil-tracking software to give Tempt the ability to direct his eyes to create digital images straight from his hospital bed. The software works when Tempt rest his eyes on a spot for a few seconds, communicating to the program to create an anchor on the point, and continues to build from there.

Pushing it further, Lieberman teamed up with the Graffiti Research Lab using Laser Tag technology, which takes computer information of the user drawing—with their hands or with their eyes—and uses projectors to “tag” onto huge surfaces such as the side of bridges, buildings (in Tempt’s case, his hospital window.) The ocular mapping, drawing, and projection of Tempts work into his hospital window was an incredible exploration of a simple idea, and done with simple technology that has been readily available for years.

During the Q&A, Lieberman had everyone in the audience stand up and take their left hand and place it on someone they don’t know. After a few seconds of letting everyone soak up the intrusion of space, he had them do the same with their right hand. Everyone in the audience was touching two people they didn’t know. He closed the night by saying, “we need more of this, this compassion in our designers who deal with mass technology.”

Additional Information:
Carla Diana
Zach Lieberman
James Bridle
Liz Danzico

Event Details:
AIGA/NY The New Future of Design

Event Photos:
Click here to view all photos from AIGA/NY The New Future of Design on Flickr.
To view additional photos, or to contribute your photos, visit our AIGA New York Flickr group.

Special thanks to guest contributing writer, Steven Merenda, for the AIGA/NY The New Future of Design event recap and photos. Steven Merenda can be found at GDFIT.