Our friends from envis precisely are hosting a new conference called decode in Munich this October. The decode conference is about design and code and combines their creative and techological aspects in one event. Speakers like the two media artists Tilman Reiff & Volker Morawe, both part of the artist collective //////////fur//// , the guys behind the fantastic painstation, or Moritz Stefaner, who will talk about the »Aesthetic of Information«, will tell us about their work and some ongoing projects.

Mario Klingemann aka quasimondo will show beautiful things made out of code and Massimo Banzi, one of the founders of arduino will talk about their open-source electronics prototyping platform. Not to forget to mention, Benedikt and Hartmut will talk about »Generative Gestaltung«, the same talk Julia and Hartmut already held at the Typo Conference in Berlin this year. Ticket sale will start end of August on their website.

Decoded Conference Website
Decoded Trailer

Yeah! Generative Gestaltung won the red dot award!

With more than 12,000 submissions from more than 60 countries, the international »red dot design award« is the largest and most renowned design competition in the world. It is divided into the »red dot award: product design«, the »red dot award: communication design« and the »red dot award: design concept.« The award-winning products are put before an international public in the red dot design museum and we are happy that »Generative Gestaltung« is now a part of it.

red dot design award

Nachdem »Generative Gestaltung« im Mai bereits vom ADC Deutschland mit dem silbernen Nagel in der Kategorie Literatur ausgezeichnet wurde, gab es jetzt vom ADC Europe (ADC*E) eine Nominierung. Unter mehreren tausend Einreichungen aus 16 verschiedenen Ländern wurden ca. 200 Projekte, unter anderen auch »Generative Gestaltung« für die Golden Trophy nominiert, die dieses Jahr 23 mal vergeben wurde. Der Grand Prix ging an die italienische Agentur JWT Italy für das Projekt »AYSWU? – INTEGRATED«. Beachtenswert ist, dass unter den 23 Goldträgern 13 aus Deutschland kommen.

When we started to work on our website, we came to the point where we had to decide which color to use to highlight links and active categories. As our corporate design intends not to use a specific color to stay as flexible as possible on the one hand, it was on the other hand hard to pick one to be used on our website. So it was obvious that we would use some kind of generative approach to generate different colors. As picking random colors is apparently uninspired, we thought about using some user data like the IP address, the version of the browser or the operating system to generate colors, that would in this case relate to the user itself. Another idea was to make use of some publicly available APIs like the Yahoo weather API or Googles finance API for example. But as there is still no onformative share on the stock market, it didn’t make much sense to use these kind of data sources as we wanted to keep it somehow personal and related to us.

So what we did instead was to install a webcam at our office and use a custom written software to take pictures triggered by some motion detection algorithm whenever any kind of object is put in front of the camera. From these pictures we extracted different kinds of colors. We worked on different approaches to get a perfect color with every picture taken. Calculating the average color didn’t work as it mostly results in some grey/brownish color. We used the fantastic colorUtils from Karsten Schmidts toxiclibs that offers different approaches to generate color palettes and sort them according to various criteria. We also sorted the colors by frequency of occurrence but realized, that it tends to be a color with low saturation, that doesn’t make a good link color. So we focused to get the color from a small area in the center of the image and added the option to adjust the brightness and saturation to finally get some good results.

Now as we got the final color we had to create a new css file and upload it to our web server. We used a slightly edited version of seltars “Post to web” Library to upload not only the changed css file but also the used source image to add it to our gallery, where we keep all the previous colors and images we´ve taken. We are currently working on an iPhone app to change the colors not only at our office but wherever we are by using the inbuilt camera. By the way, todays color is #E77D00                , if you want to see the rest, check out the gallery

Previous Colors of the Day

Next Friday Julia is talking about Generative Design and the book “Generative Gestaltung” in Halle at Burg Giebichenstein

Friday, July 2nd, 2010
4:00pm – 5:30pm
Burg Giebichenstein,
Hochschule für Kunst und Design Halle,
Neuwerk 7, Erdgeschoss,
Raum 103/104

more information

For five years now the see conference has been gathering the most creative people and exciting ideas on the topic of information visualization. The interdisciplinary platform brings together fields like design, art, architecture and new technologies.

I have been there for the second time now and it was inspiring as always. The following artists and designers are just some of the speakers that were talking this year.

Nicholas Felton – Feltron

The New York graphic designer Nicholas Felton has been logging his life for the last six years, visualising a review of his behaviour in personal “Annual Reports”. Nicholas uses the tracking platform “Daytum” to collect the everyday data on which his high-quality design reports are based. At the “see conference”, Nicholas will be talking about the visualisation process behind these projects and he will present which personal insights into his own behaviour he gained through the years. Nicholas works as a graphic designer for magazines like the Wall Street Journal, Wired and Creative Review. He has taught Interaction Design at the School of Visual Arts in New York and Typography at the Parsons New School of Design. His projects have won prizes at numerous exhibitions and in numerous competitions.

feltron.com

Dieter Brell – 3deluxe

Dieter Brell is co-founder of the approximately 30-strong transdisciplinary design team 3deluxe. The international active design and architecture office was founded in 1992 in Wiesbaden and maintains branch offices in Hamburg and Shanghai. As artistic director of 3deluxe in/exterior, Dieter Brell works on holistic design solutions in the field of spatial design and architecture. 3deluxe’s characteristic and organically inspired design vocabulary has proven to be iconic in an international context and sets new standards due to its complexity and atmospheric density. Since 3deluxe was founded in the middle of the 1990s, Dieter Brell has been responsible for numerous projects both in Germany as well as other countries, including thematic productions and trade fair presences (e.g. for MTV and Autostadt, 1999-2001); the multimedia theme worlds scape at Expo 2000 and Cyberhelvetia at Swiss Expo.02; participation in exhibitions at the P.S.1 MOMA Contemporary Art Center (1999) and the jewellery store D’Fly in New York (2002); the CocoonClub for Sven Väth (2004); several projects in the framework of the Artistic and Cultural Programme of the Federal (German) Government to accompany FIFA World Cup 2006; the event design of the World Cup closing ceremony in Berlin, as well as the Leonardo Glass Cube (2007) corporate architecture which has received several awards.

video of the lecture

Gideon Obarzanek – Chunky Move

Founded in Australia by choreographer Gideon Obarzanek, his company Chunky Move has earned an enviable reputation for producing a distinct yet unpredictable brand of genre-defying dance performance. Obarzanek’s works have been diverse in form and content and include stage productions, installations, site-specific works and film. His multi-award winning works have been performed in many festivals and theatres around the world in the U.K, Europe, Asia and the Americas. While much of Gideon’s work is concerned with human behaviour, how people get along or don’t, he also engages with technology to create imagistic productions that look at how we perceive our own bodies and the space around us.

His collaborations with interactive software engineer, Frieder Weiss suggest layers of images and movement we cannot normally see but which we feel or know to exist. Responding in real time to movement and sound, the technology becomes an integral part of the aesthetic and kinaesthetic stimulus experienced by the viewers. Paradoxically, Gideon’s collaborations with sophisticated technology reveal to us things extremely human.

video of the lecture

After moving into our new office we got a little house or rather office warming present. “The Street Clock” by Fluid Forms. Its a clock made out of acrylic or wood with a lasercutted streetmap of a place or city of your choice. No question that the location of our office in Berlin / Friedrichshain was chosen for this present. Fluid Forms are Hannes Walter, an austrian designer and the creative-coder and mathematician, Stephen Williams from New Zealand. I had the chance to met these guys last year at the ArsElectronica where we took part in a little Fabbing workshop at the ArsElectronica Center FabLab.

By the way, if you don’t want a clock but still show your solidarity to a specific city, they just “kickstarted” their latest product, the street earrings. You can use the editor on their website to choose the right location for your earrings and turn the map of your favorite place into a beautiful golden, memory provoking pieces of jewelry. Or just buy some for 30 EUR. There are still some Berlin ones left at Designspotter.


FluidForms Website

The Institute for Visual Communication of HGK FHNWpresents a series of lecture under the name “Wild und Weise” Next Wednesday Julia is talking about Generative Art and the “Generative Gestaltung” Book

Wednesday, June 16, 2010
4:30pm – 5:30pm
Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst Basel, Institut Visuelle Kommunikation
Vogelsangstrasse 15, Basel

http://www.fhnw.ch/hgk/ivk/lectures