Members of Free Art and Technology (FAT), OpenFrameworks, the Graffiti Research Lab, and The Ebeling Group communities have teamed-up with a legendary LA graffiti writer, publisher and activist, named Tony Quan, aka TEMPTONE. Tony was diagnosed with ALS in 2003, a disease which has left him almost completely physically paralyzed… except for his eyes. This international team is working together to create a low-cost, open source eye-tracking system that will allow ALS patients to draw using just their eyes. The long-term goal is to create a professional/social network of software developers, hardware hackers, urban projection artists and ALS patients from around the world who are using local materials and open source research to creatively connect and make eye art.

.: eyewriter

The software controlling the video was written in Max. The paint roller does not use any sort of paint, it simply contains green LEDs. The software tracks the color green and outputs the x y position which are sent to drawing commands and the strokes are textured with video.

Sweatshoppe is video artists Bruno Levy and Blake Shaw. They plan on eventually releasing the software, but only after it is much more refined, buffed up with features and is user-friendly.

.: via Wooster Collective

Check out the objects presented at Prototype Exibition 03, a Design Hub initiative, in Japan. We really enjoyed the Hanger Stool by Torafu Architects, somewhat reminiscent of early Jasper Morrison.

I have been feeling more and more uncomfortable with the increasing presence of design in everyday situations and in products lined up on the shelves of everyday shops. For years people have faulted design for being inaccessible, over priced and out of tune with the mass market. Now that it has become mainstream its beginning to look like a sell out, as if design simply stepped into the shoes of all the cheap ugly products which were previously available and made them cheap and ugly and highly visible.

Design, which is supposed to be responsible for the man-made environment we all inhabit, seems to be polluting it instead. Its historic and idealistic goal to serve industry and the happy consuming masses at the same time, of conceiving things easier to make and better to live with, has been side-tracked.

A while ago I found some heavy old hand-blown wine glasses in a junk shop. At first it was just their shape which attracted my attention, but slowly, using them every day, they have become something more than just nice shapes, and I notice their presence in other ways. If I use a different type of glass, for example, I feel something missing in the in the atmosphere of the table. When I use them the atmosphere returns, and each sip of wines a pleasure even if the wine is not. If I even catch a look at them on the shelf they radiate something good. This quota of atmospheric spirit is the most mysterious and elusive quality in objects. How can it be that so many designs fail to have any real beneficial effect on the atmosphere, and yet these glasses, made without much design thought or any attempt to achieve anything other than a good ordinary wine glass, happen to be successful? Its been puzzling me for years and influencing my attitude to what constitutes a good design. Ive started to measure my own designs against objects like these glasses, and not to care if the designs become less noticeable. In fact a certain lack of noticeability has become a requirement.

Meanwhile design, which used to be almost unknown as a profession, has become a major source of pollution.
Encouraged by glossy lifestyle magazine, and marketing departments, its become a competition to make things as noticeable as possible by means of colour, shape and surprise. Its historic and idealistic purpose, to serve industry and the happy consuming masses at the same time, of conceiving things easier to make and better to live with, seems to have been side-tracked. The virus has already infected the everyday environment. The need for businesses to attract attention provides the perfect carrier for the disease. Design makes things seem special, and who wants normal if they can have special?

And thats the problem. Once normal has been wiped out theres no going back. Its a bit like building new housing on virgin countryside, or developing huge areas of cities at one time. What has grown naturally and unselfconsciously over the years cannot easily be replaced. The normality of a street of shops, which has developed over time, offering various products and trades, is a delicate organism. Not, that old things shouldnt be replaced or that new things are bad, just that things which are designed to attract attention are, from the outset, going to be unsatisfactory. There are better ways to design than putting a lot of effort into making something look special. Special is generally less useful than normal, and less rewarding in the long term. Special things demand attention for the wrong reasons, interrupting potentially good atmosphere with their awkward presence.~

The wine glasses are a signpost to somewhere beyond normal, because they transcend normality. Theres nothing wrong with normal of course, but normal was the product of an earlier, less self conscious age, and designers working at replacing old with new and hopefully better, are doing it without the benefit of innocence which normal demands. The wine glasses and other objects form the past reveal the existence of super normal, like spraying paint on a ghost. You may have a feeling its there but its difficult to see. The super normal object is the result of a long tradition of evolutionary advancement in the shape of everyday things, not attempting to break with the history of form but rather trying to summarise it, knowing is the artificial replacement for normal, which with time and understanding may become grafted to everyday life.

Jasper Morrison Super Normal 2006 Lars Müller Publishers

Around this time we came across the writings of Christopher Alexander whose book “A Pattern Language” seemed to express similar goals to ours, if a little less ironic and possibly a little dry. Anyhow it was confirmation that we weren’t alone in thinking of design as a tool for improving daily life and the appreciation of human existence. We followed these early projects with some urban planning in Vienna, organised by Gregor Eichinger and Christian Knechtl, where we tried to defend an old-fashioned Viennese locality from the invasion of high street shopping and rising property rents. It went very well at first, with plenty of praise for our approach and words of intention from local politicians, but in the end it went the way of most urban projects, as the politicians, once out of the spotlight, quietly moved on to the next press conference.

One project which went particularly badly involved the design of signage and street furniture for a “parc national de France” to the south of Paris, where our attempts to suggest that people living within the park’s boundary should have the right to a normal existence, and not be treated like animals on a safari, were mistaken for an insolent and negative approach to the briefing.

In the end it turned out that they were looking for some fancy metalwork. In any case we never had much luck with these urban projects. Another project, code-named “0-5 metres” in East Berlin shortly after the wall came down, set out to avoid architecture (and the cult of monument building) as the solution to social problems, in favour of dealing with the city’s surface, with local services, from shopping to street cleaning. This project’s presentation drew angry shouts from some of the audience who again assumed that we had taken a cynical approach to the briefing. There were others which went the same way, but Utilism’s greatest urban triumph is probably a project for Fisch Platz in Graz, Austria, where we succeeded in removing travel company stickers from the windows of the bus station cafe, so passengers could see if their buses had arrived, and installing a couple of speed bumps to allow them to get to the buses in safety. You may laugh about it, but the sense of freedom at making decisions which were 1000/0 practical was enormous, as if all the nonsense which we put up with in our daily existence were swept away and replaced with a very simple system where practicality and common sense are more important than all the stupid reasoning which normally shapes the world. There were other angles to it than pure practicality. The driving force of our thinking was the human experience of the situation. The cafe was a nice place to be, it was just a pity that you couldn’t enjoy it for worrying about missing the bus. The inspiration was the atmosphere of the place and the realisation that with the application of a little sensible thinking we could make it work again. This was an exceptional success. On the whole, it seemed like the powers entrusted with such projects were reluctant to stoop to such low levels of practicality and consideration for the human element almost as if these were secondary to the aesthetic evidence of money being spent. It’s probably not that bad anymore and recently urban planning issues have become more fashionable with younger architectural practises, but after the disappointing results I decided to concentrate these Utilistic principles on designing objects, whose existence doesn’t depend on politicians or decisions by committee and where there seemed to be a higher success rate.

I started to notice that successful objects, that is, objects which are good to live with, seemed to share certain characteristics. They were never the result of aesthetic decisions alone, nor were they purely functional. They always balanced these two extremes with the additional consideration of the appropriateness of materials and their combination, of the human experience of using and living with the object, of the objects effect on its surroundings and of the communication of its purpose. I realised that certain less noticeable objects could over time become the object of daily choice by virtue of charm, stealth and efficiency. In the long term they just had more character for the job than others of the same class. Most of these objects were not ‘designed’ in the marketing sense, probably because of marketing’s simultaneous demands of uniqueness and sameness, which seems to prohibit practicality and any genuinely well meant problem solving. It’s a sad fact that marketing is often the motor of unnecessary change, replacing satisfactory products with products which may be less efficient but which are easier to sell. I doubt a comparison of everyday objects of previous decades, even previous centuries, with those available today would show an improvement in overall quality. Technologies and new materials may improve performance and design; they may bring things up to date and occasionally innovate, but the experience of living with an object seems to have cheapened. Furthermore, it appears that the more ‘developed’ a society becomes the more value is placed on useless objects and the less appreciation there is for something useful. We need to keep this appreciation alive or we may lose touch with reality. 

Jasper Morrison Everything but the Walls 2002 Lars Müller Publishers 

Anonymous objects of a more recent past have received greater appreciation. With the arrival of the industrial revolution the authorship of such products belonged, for the most part, to the inspired factory engineer or enthusiastic industrialist. These objects had a new kind of anonymity, not because people held no interest but because they were no longer handmade or unique in any way. Free to multiply, these new objects quickly threw off any nostalgic attachment to their ancestors, and in doing so invested themselves with a mysterious power: the power of identical repetition. With this power the object inhabited its own world, liberated from man’s imperfections and inefficiencies, in which it developed an “objectality” almost as distinct as a “personality”. Identifying objectality (evaluating the appeal of a thing and how useful it is to us) allows us to decide if we like or dislike an object. The character of objects with no particular parentage is quite often more appealing than the character of “pedigree” objects, where the creators ego may have replaced some of the object’s usefulness and even its ability to behave naturally in everyday surroundings.

More recently, anonymously conceived objects are less in evidence, or perhaps they are just evolving, occupying new territory. Household objects of low technical sophistication, which used to be the preserve of anonymity now come only with names attached, like some new kind of packaging. Marketing executives push designers for product individuality and USPs (unique selling points) often to the detriment of a design. Less glamorous (more functional) product groups have kept alive a tradition of disinterest in promoting themselves as anything special. Anonymity is now to be found at the higher end of the technology ladder: sports equipment, electronics, vehicles, where Corporate ego outweighs personal ego and brand name is everything.

We designers are all guilty of promoting our own cause, which is only natural, but perhaps we could study and absorb some of the mysterious quality and naturalness which anonymous objects, free of their author’s ego, so often have, and which is so often missing from our more self-consciously planned offerings. The value of the anonymous object is to remind us (those involved in design) that in the real world an object is just an object that depends on its long-term usefulness for survival.

Jasper Morrison Immaculate Conception – Objects without Author 1996 Ottagono No. 118