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Redesign


Tuesday, May 28, 2019

 

 

Making the redesign of an already existing page.

 

It helped me to discover all the interesting moments in the structure of the web page and to divide the webpage into different layers.
I chose that page (https://designblog.rietveldacademie.nl/?p=77833) and started to draw the structure of it. I noticed that this page doesn’t have a lot of air between different parts of information, words, and texts and all data ranged to the center. Moreover, there are six colors, 4 fonds and two main pictures with bright and sharps form inside. All paragraphs are left-aligned and they end in a rather chaotic order. However, squares around words help to divide information between each other. The quantity of the colors attract the biggest part of our attention and we can feel a little lost.

 

 

Sketch

 

 

 

 

Modular grid

 

 

 

 

The fullness of the page

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Hierarchy of the given information


 

 

 

Colors

 

 

 

 

Example of a new Design

 

By doing a new design for the existing page I tried to pay attention to the pictures and elements on the images which always can become the part of the website.  In that case, I chose circles as the decoration of the page. Also, I wanted to divide the main text (essay) from the surrounding data. So color gave me a possibility for doing that. Plus I added a little bit more space between words and made distance between tags, title, essay. It helps us to get a breath.

 

The Dice Man


Sunday, May 26, 2019
I browsed in the blog, partly floating, partly with full attention. I moved in the world of the blog through the tags on the left. I had a method: First post I choose randomly, then I scrolled down until the post ends, if something caught my eye or my mind, I lingered, wrote some notes, seldom made a screenshot.  Then, I clicked on a left purple tag that is located on the same line as the end of the post (the grey tagging section). I had some choice between 2-6 tags, depends on how big the grey tagging section was.

The first post was in Dutch, so the visualization was the only thing I had.

Grey Hypocrisy felt like it was made for me, the first hint, “quest for the dull”, he said. With an image of a room, with a personless solitary chair. These kind of rooms and chairs I’m trying to portray for a while.

5 years ago, Marlies wrote about Imme van der Haak . She reminded me of Yocheved Weinfeld,  Yocheved Weinfeld, and her artworks in the 70’s.

“why?”> ON QUESTIONING > “wrong side”

I encountered a post that was written on my birthday, and then a post that was written on my mother’s birthday. It’s gotta be a sign! I found myself looking for hints, not sure for what. 

Keep scrolling.

“warning” > “Ability to choose” >

“waiting”! “For the next to come along.”

More and more hints. Like these sentences are designed for me. I realized that I’m browsing like I could wander the streets as a small girl: not being a “believing person” but to believe in traffic lights. wherever there is a green light is the way I should go, it’s the right way for me, no space for free choice, it’s from above. From the god of traffic lights.

> “waiting to be found” > chairs!

“Death”> “yellow and tiny”>

I agreed with Rosa Doornenbal, she wrote some nice stuff. I started to decide for me, what is a metaphor in this infinite data. To find the metaphors.

Marie Knudsen wrote about a jewelry book about joints. Extract from the book: ”A joint is a place where two or more parts are united or made to fit together.”– is this about silver or people? she asks herself.

for me, it was About putting stuff out of context on purpose. To give things meaning by taking their context away. It’s about the movement between the details and being far from the details until its abstract.

“alive”>”alienation”>”abstract”>”time”>”enjoying”>”no time”>”absence”>”all sort of apes”>”allegorical”>”queue”

brows like you are looking for a quate. Saw a quaote of Walter Benjamin: “Beauty is not the object and not the shell, but the object in its shell.” Ok. Maybe another day it will mean something, keep it.

“I would like to bring your attention to noticing things.” I think it’s funny.

Walking with a Line was beautiful. Made it clear for me that sometimes the combination of things punctuate your heart. The context is important. Context is everything. to put things out of context means just putting it in a new context, in order to look at them beautifully.

look at this together! It’s so different then as two solitary pictures. 

And this also, it does something only together, when isolated it’s almost nothing.

Scrolled more.

I see more chairs. Van Goch’s chair >”walls” >>>

The browsing led me to this:

“The Dice Man”

If you are looking for an answer for something, a hint, or that the cosmos will decide things for you, you are in the right place. This blog and this post in particular. You can try to find your answer in the cards below, just click on one and see what it says.

The dice man is a book that tells the story of a New York psychiatrist named Luke Rhinehart who, feeling bored and unfulfilled in life, starts making decisions based only on the roll of a dice. He can’t change the dice’s decisions, including decisions about sex, murder, rape, and more.

This is your dice.

If the cards are not enough, you can start browsing the blog looking for a hint for life or an answer, using the overwhelming amount of posts the blog has to offer and using the randomness surfing that is possible here. But you need a method, you can use mine:

First post I choose randomly, then I scrolled down until the post ends, if something caught my eye or my mind, I lingered, wrote some notes, seldom made a screenshot.  Then, I clicked on a left purple tag that is located on the same line as the end of the post (the grey tagging section). I had some choice between 2-6 tags, depends on how big the grey tagging section was. And then I continued to the next post, scrolled down, chose a tag one the left that is exactly at the end of the post, and so on.

The amount of time you should do it is as the number that is on your card, or until you find your perfect hint.

     

From Inside


Sunday, May 26, 2019

FROM INSIDE

It’s like entering a never-ending tunnel.
I step in and I am lost.
I step in and I see such an excessive amount of possibilities that it becomes overwhelming.
It is extremely vast but there is only one right way.

After a long, long search when I find it, a bright light illuminates my path.
Suddenly, I understand everything, I am sure of my moves, I know how to continue.

 

A pair of pink ballet shoes shines in the dark and show me a new entrance, but inside I am still blinded and confused. Quickly I realize the pink slippers help me to adapt my body to the space and guide me towards the next opening.
I still cannot see clearly, but I feel. I feel smooth silk, tickling wool, rough cotton all around the wall. Am I in a costume shop? I choose a piece with a tulle fabric resembling a Ballet costume. I wonder, am I in Jaime Hayon’s house? Is this black hole that I am trapped in an art piece or the pieces inside are a creations in itself?
I am about to give up when a new light appears. It is a search engine and I type in « email ». Nothing fits me, I cannot find what I am looking for. So I try « futuristic ». And to my greatest delight a new gate opens.
The relief doesn’t last long. My body starts to tremble, I am dizzy and an echo is repeating the words « social » and « design », « social-design ». If that weren’t enough, guilt and uneasiness take over my body. I rewind my previous steps to find out what has changed. I have a new clothing piece! I ask myself: What is Vetements doing in fashion industry? And I quickly take it off. That’s when a new entrance, saying Jacob Jensen appeares.
However, when I enter, nothing looks like him. So I look for a multiplayer. I cannot find anyone, only a chess set. So I step in the role of a knight and find myself in the next cave: a library from the Middle Ages full of old books. Pick a goddamn book, I am told. Only if it were so simple. This choice will define my entire future, the new world I will discover. Quartz obsidian, how does it sound? I visualize a bright, colorful space to put an end to this darkness. Luckily, I wasn’t wrong. My new world constitutes a Responsive Color System.
Although this brightness is liberating at first, it blinds my senses. So I have to search again. The result is unspeakable. I cannot recognize my visual system anymore. I enter a world full of code names. It takes me a considerable time to figure out only the name of my new Earth: CIE-1931-System. It is hard because in that world I am only an x, a tiny, dull, lifeless particle of the system. Almost the youngest.
I am lost again, swimming in the fog. I am desperate to find a safe place, when a new concept is introduced to me: The Exform by Nicolas Bouriaud. I dive into this new opportunity with the hope of finally finding clarity.

But I enter again…

I’m new here


Friday, May 24, 2019

.

*****

I don’t really know the way, but I want to. I have this habit to wander off randomly when I’m unknown with a place. Just to see where I’ll end up if I let go of control. “Let fate decide” says the romantic in me.

After a while I see patterns and I believe that I know where I am. Finding attractive by-streets in every corner. But that’s an illusion. By the next turn this pattern is shattered by reality.

I don’t know where I’m going, but I know I don’t want to stay. Just keep going, till this frame turns into bedlam. Borders can’t contain me anymore. Looking back I can’t trace back my origins. I’m not lost. I’m new here.

I am chaos.

.

my long lost error 404 (sad ballad)


Tuesday, December 18, 2018

Searching for broken links on the world wide web.
The question is how to do that, when a broken link is not usually something you look for, but something you find when you need it the least.

We were looking for the parts of the internet, old and forgotten, where no IT-guy would ever come back to clean up old links. We used random keywords as “blogger” and “star” or “dogs” searching for old blogs from the late 90’s not a lot later than the new millennium.
With this method we came across a lot of content long lost in the www. We collected screenshots from these sites that had dead links, also allowing them to once again have a new life in another part of the internet.
Also we saved the search history to show the paths we walked towards the broken links.
At last, from all this digging for dead links, a song came to life.
In the lyrics of the song (which are included in this blogpost) we reflect on the broken links, how we found them and most importantly the content we never got to see.

Soon the actual song will be released..
..so stay awake and keep an eye out for your soundcloud feed.

…………………….

Hello old blogs
We are revisiting you
We are looking for you (Where AARE you)
The search is hard and difficult
The Road is long and bumpy (Uuhuhuhuhuh)

To find one piece of gold in the Wild Wild web
(I’m an internet cowboy in the Wild Wild web)
(Searching for broken links)
(Lost in the cybernet)

My long lost error 404

You caught me by surprise
And then i wanted to click on this link
But i can’t
It’s a broken link

I’m an internet cowboy lost in the wild wild web…. ….

Oooh broken link you caught me by surprise
The connection is lost what should I do?
Everything is lost

Lara, I found you by typing “blogger” and “psychic” in google
I chose the golden years of 1997 and 1998 for the search resultsss

Lara
What are thinking about
What are you’re thoughts
Why are you so sad
I’m a cowboy looking for you, My long lost link

One small star, I rise up softly for a new hunt
The poem 224 you did not work
You were lost in the void In the title of one small star
“Pardon me deserts that I don’t rush to you spearing a spoon full of”

I found you by typing blogger and star
I wrote/keyword “blogger” and “hotline” found this weird blog
Another broken link
Another lost story
The men wearing suits and pink letters of a tele company

Who are you
Where are you from
Where are you now

I need you!!!!

Under a one small star the cowboy hunts for a broken link
The day is done and the world of the wild wild web is lost

Is it possible to create an ideal ‘404 not found’ page?


Sunday, December 9, 2018

‘404 Error’ pages are basically pages that either doesn’t exist or they are broken. Sometimes being in control of thousands of pages on a site is troublesome and errors can be inevitable. However you can create an excellent 404 page that could in fact help your user.

Even though it can act as an advantage people still tend to avoid altering their 404 pages. But what could be useful to include in a 404 error page?

Tips:
  1. Have a search engine so that people can search what they are looking for
  2. Have a link to the main page so that people can redirect
  3. Create contact forms so that people can inform you about the broken link/fill in their inquiries

https://github.com/404

 

https://www.orangecoat.com/lost

 

4. It’s always disappointing when you reach an 404 Error page. Therefore it is a good idea to prevent further frustration.

 

https://studiofables.com/404?fbclid=IwAR213GVHwe_Z8uTB841NB0b1inAtyidMJ0FkA1bMmvDjBUNuejlz49nCUc0 

 

5. Or you can have a really playful design such as

 

http://www.romainbrasier.fr/404.html

 

6. You can also have a funny design.

 

https://www.newyorker.com/404page?fbclid=IwAR2TPHPft9kTmYHZ8iJYRXNsCPvkSXEMs7G1tOA_bBn8facq0bnUWb3dx2k 

 

In conclusion, 404 error pages can be useful for your users if you care about making it into a helpful page.

 

 

 

emojis


Sunday, May 13, 2018

So what it basically iS?

.                                    Symbols, that help to describe/show things/emotions.

Did it all start from the primitive period, when people drew animals on the walls of the caves, using images and signs in order to describe?

2017-01-092_1300

 

 

Or from the first ‘:)’ in the poem from 17th century?

 

 

emojis

 

 

Anyways, it became popular in the 90s when in SMS people started using emoticons. Emoticons are punctuation marks, letters, and numbers used to create pictorial icons that generally display an emotion or sentiment.
Actually, it officially started in 1982, when in Carnegie Mellon University the joke in online message board went wrong and made a huge misunderstanding. Dr. Scott E. Fahlman came with a proposal to use emoticons in order to define jokes and non-jokes.  : – )

Kao(face)moji(character)s are Japanese emoticons ¯\_(?)_/¯ .

e(picture)moji(character)
the first emoji was made by Shigetaka Kurita in 1999 for the first Japanese mobile internet platform i-mode.
(the 176 original emojis are now part of the permanent New York MOMA collection)

In 2011 Apple (of course) made them famous by adding them in iOS 5, but only for the Japanese version.                                  (2 years later Android joined 🙂
After noticing the growing popularity of emojis around the world they added them to every keyboard.
Now every user can switch from English or German to emojis’ keyboard.

With the help of Unicode Consortium    (- a non-profit group that maintain text standards across computers) (and Google’s petition to get emojis recognized  )             emojis are (almost) everywhere.                                                                                                                                                                                                    O-:

in 2010 Unicode accepted 625 new emojis proposed by Apple.

in 2013 the US Congress Library added the ‘Moby Dick’ written in emojis languages

in 2014 the gender and skin-color issues raised

in 2018 157 emojis were added.

 

You can propose your emoji and explain why it is necessary to add it                                                                                                 http://unicode.org/emoji/selection.html

2 times a week the Unicode meets up to discuss wether the pasta should be on a plate or in the bowl

wether it is important to add a sugar cube to emojis’ list

wether the girl’s haircut should be till shoulders or longer

You can go to https://emojipedia.org/                if you are not sure in the meaning of the emoji and do not want the misunderstanding to happen

You can go to                                                             if you want to analyze the emojis you are using

http://emojinalysis.tumblr.com/                                                                            (sometimes they can tell more than your daily horoscope from Cosmopolitan)

 

http://emojitracker.com/                       if you want to know what is in trend on Twitter

 

 

We are now way more reachable for any person in the world

We are now able to understand people without words

 

                           are emojis the new Esperanto?

                                                                                                                                                                How are they effecting us socially?

In Japan, where the emoji was born, there are declining birth rates due to people loosing interest in romantic relationships.

 Hikikimori – a group of young men who dont leave the house and only communicate through technology.

                             We are loosing the power to communicate face to face.

However, Match.com released data proving that the more emojis a singleton uses on their dating site seems to result in more dates, therefore more sex.

      Our phones have become priority.               In general, if someones phone pings they stop their real life conversation for their phone.

Emojis are  proven to help dyslexic people – they help us to sense emotions in bland messages.

                                                                                                             what is the future of emojis and our language?

Roots and Branches


Thursday, May 4, 2017

Go on Wikipedia and start a research for something, it can be the most common thing or notion you think about. Then, start clicking on the first link you see, in the sentence that defines what you are searching for. Again and again. If you arrive on a webpage where you have been before, just click on the next link, so not the first but the second one and see where you will end up. Here is my example :

London

london_1100

> capital city

capital_1100

> municipality
> urban area
> human settlement
> geography
> science
> knowledge
> awareness
> perception
> sensory nervous system
> nervous system
> eumatazoa
> clade
> organism
> biology
> natural science
> natural phenomena
> phenomenon
> experience
> philosophy

SQLtree1

So, this brings us to a crucial point. It shows how important arborescence (which means in French from the trunk to the branches) is in a research process. By starting from a very specific subject, you can end up on something you don’t expect to see, something really independent from your first research. By a system of hierarchy, websites choose for you what you should see, in order to make your research larger and more relevant. The concepts presented through the pages are of course connected, because terms are presented to define the notion you are looking for. That is by the way essential for every website : to give a hierarchy. But how? On what logic?

If you follow the previous example on Wikipedia, you can try how many times you want, you will normally end up on the Wikipedia page related to philosophy.

By placing some hyperlinks, you can give an orientation on an internet reasearch. In that sense, links are super efficient tools. Just have a look to what is offered on an everyday internet journey.

But more widely, from the easiest thing, you can always go to something larger in terms of meaning : groups of living species, geographical regions, etc. By defining something, you need an element with a bigger concept to categorize it. Then, is philosophy the final notion, the highest point to reach?

It is basically more than just a simple category in which we can put everything like a cellar where you come to take an old box once a year to remember your sweet childhood.

 

A dopamine delivery service

By spending time by scrolling down, letting my eyes wandering a bit on the DesignBlog, and repeating the same process previously experienced, I found that article by Olya Troitskaya about a concept that defines pretty well this process. It is called “cyberflânerie”. Have a look at it here.

flâneur (word which comes from the french verb flâner) is according to Baudelaire, quoted by Olya Troitskaya, “a person who walks the city in order to experience it”.

By experiencing a part of the internet content in a certain order, you expect something to get, a crucial information, or just an everyday surprise, your dopamine doses maybe. At least some satisfaction.

Play at this (not)serious game, make this fantastic tool a hijacked object, follow the lines, think about this endless journey, how you move through this digital space in terms of pictures and map, with a starting point and an unreachable end.

The ignorant ‘Homo Ludens’ of the 21st century


Sunday, October 23, 2016

Last September, after visiting the exhibition about Constant Nieuwenhuys’s ‘New Babylon’ in The Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, I delved into his work and ideas. I came a across a movie about Constant titled: City Rising by Metahaven. Intrigued by this contemporary view on Constant’s thoughts of society, I started to examine the thoughts of Metahaven on the web and especially found one of their latest works called The Sprawl (Propaganda about Propaganda), interesting. Having seen the exhibition and both the works from Metahaven, in my opinion the freedom of the individual is central in all three. Though the way the individual is presented by both Constant and Metahaven, especially in The Sprawl is entirely different. This led me to ask some questions:
Can we actually call ourselves free individuals with all the contemporary propaganda thrown at us? Should we act more towards Constant’s ideas? Is Metahaven pushing us into the right direction?
To explain my thoughts and to enlarge upon these questions, first I’d like to shortly introduce Constant’s ‘New Babylon’, Metahaven (City Rising) and The Sprawl and later on give insight to a correspondence between Metahaven and me.

New Babylon
‘New Babylon’ is the imagination of a progressive and modern utopian society by Constant Nieuwenhuys by means of maquettes, drawing, movies, graphics and manifests. In ‘New Babylon’ dynamics are crucial and where the inhabitants arrange their artificial environment. An automated community where labor is unnecessary whereby everyone can fully focus on developing their creative ideas. The individual decides how it’s habitat looks like without any restrictions or creative borders.

Metahaven
Metahaven is a Dutch design group based in Amsterdam founded by Daniel van Der Velden and Vinca Kruk. They’ve already had many exhibitions including the MOMA PS1 in New York and the Museum Of Modern Art in Warsaw. The group released several films and graphic designs focusing on contemporary political and social issues. For this instance City Rising (2014); a homage to Constant Nieuwenhuys’s ‘New Babylon’. The film is an exploration of the individuals’conditions of life, work, and love in neo-liberal times where the architectural maquettes of Constant’s ‘New Babylon’ are displayed in the video. This is a general example of what Metahaven deals with.

The Sprawl (Propaganda About Propaganda)
The Sprawl is a multi-channel video installation, feature-length film and episodic online documentary that considers the “ways in which fantasy can be designed so as to seem or feel like a truth”, as Daniel van der Velden describes and states that the Internet has become a disorganized geopolitical super weapon. Where, for example, funny cat videos distract us from urgent matters and that’s where The Sprawl jumps in by asking pressing questions about the internet in relation to our idea of the independent individual few others dare to ask. Looking at the design one can see that The Sprawl is a paranoid, digital trip in which the form and content keep on influencing each other in combination with futuristic beats and sounds by Kuedo, green screen-manipulations and glitch elements which deliver a chaotic and high pressuring image to the viewer.
All the different parts of The Sprawl, the so called “Shards”, can be found on the website sprawl.space; the interface of the project.

Fullscreen-capture-5272016-103924-AM

 

The Contemporary Individual
In both Constant’s ‘New Babylon’ and Metahaven’s The Sprawl, there is an interesting and different way how they approach and think of the individual. Constant claims –for his utopia to fully act well– that every individual should be able to free himself from daily routines such as labor, to become an adventurous, playful and dynamic human being, what he calls the ‘Homo Ludens’. So as a community, all individuals can create a new society where everything can be artificially influenced. Metahaven puts a question mark over the reliability of the internet and the information flows the individual engulfs. What is fantasy and what is real and objective? The internet makes extensive use of propaganda where the individual only gets the information certain people wants them to get. The Sprawl is trying to clarify this; that third parties and the internet form the individual by deciding which and what kind of information we can assume to be relevant. Metahaven tries to convince us we’re not that much of individuals at all, because of all the contemporary propaganda thrown at us.

In the correspondence between Metahaven and me, I asked them a question about The Sprawl to better understand the true meaning and purpose of the project.
My question: (Translated from Dutch) “How does Metahaven thinks to convince the individual by means of The Sprawl that the information we absorb in our daily life is manipulated; and in what way their chosen design contributes to this goal?”.
Unfortunately Metahaven didn’t want to answer the question based on the facts that they don’t speculate about their own made work not knowing what will be written about it and they don’t want to interpret their own work; they are of course fully entitled to do so.
However, they did send interesting references to articles which already conduce to better understanding The Sprawl. Troubled I couldn’t completely understand the project first;
from the article of Ruth Saxelby (see link below), it became clear this is actually a conscious choice of Metahaven:

-The Sprawl is less concerned with what “the truth” is, and more interested in the impact that the internet avalanche of conflicting truths has on the reality we experience, both individually and collectively.-

-The Sprawl’s tagline is “propaganda about propaganda,” and its third manifestation—dropped like breadcrumbs across YouTube—is the one that feels closest to the spirit of the project; its fragmentation is a reflection of the way we half-see, half-read, half-understand the world in these hyper-distracted times. But what does propaganda even mean today?-

“I used to think that propaganda was about persuading people. Jacques Ellul who wrote the classic study of propaganda in the 1960s, French philosopher, called it mass persuasion. He didn’t say propaganda was good or bad, he said it was a part of modern society, a part of technological society, a part of mass industrialized society, whether it’s getting people to wear condoms or to get them to become Maoists. Soviet propaganda used to be, ‘Believe in communism, Moscow is the shining beacon on the socialist hill.’”
“Now it doesn’t seem to be about that. It’s just about deconstructing the other side, disrupting Western narratives, of any sort. There’s a steady stream of disinformation whose purpose seems to be to sort of undermine the very idea that truth is provable.”—Peter Pomerantsev, The Sprawl

 

Metahaven Is Breaking The Propaganda Machine – The FADER
Every individual has the right to create it’s own truth and what to believe. The internet gives us the idea we get equal choices and information flows, though this isn’t true. Big parties as multinationals, internet-companies and media-tycoons or even Metahaven, have a greater possibility to proclaim their “truth”. The individual is often not aware where certain information arises from.
To get back to Constant and Metahaven together. It indeed seems we, the many individuals, are trapped between many flows of information each claiming to proclaim the truth; while no one really knows what is the “truth” nor whether it exists, and far from being able to call ourselves “Homo Ludens”.

a_39078

Constant Nieuwenhuys,’Homo Ludens’, 1964. picto©Constant Foundation/SM

A performance in n dimensions


Monday, June 16, 2014

In spring 2014 Designblog was invited by the 26th International Biennial of Graphic Design Brno (subtitled Education and Schools) to prepare a presentation for their Open OFF Program.
I decided to involve a group of BasicYear students in a research focussed on browsing the blog. The goal was to look for a personal objective and to visualize the browsing behavior it generated.
In an effort to regain more insight in the position of Designblog, we invited Klaas Kuitenbrouwer to lecture on the position of blogs as part of the wide interwoven internet space. A space that turned out to look much flatter than our imagination could have ascribed it.
The lecture later developed into this text supporting "WORDPLAY", our final presentation at the Biennial. No better place than to publish that text as part of the student research project "Browsing Designblog" on the Designblog itself.

Henk Groenendijk : moderator Designblog

 

 

While the screen of the device you are using shows that Designblog has a relevant two-dimensionality to it, this text will take you along perspectives on Designblog from single dimensions to two-and-a-half, three, four and even the ever flexible ndimensions in which Designblog simultaneously exists.

 

Address

http://designblog,rietveldacademie.nl
is an address, a pointer to a location. An address refers to a particular spot, a one-dimensional unit that is typically part of a thing with more dimensions.

An address like this has two kinds of capacities:  one is understood and used by machines, and the other is for humans. In its machinic capacity, designblog.rietveldacademie.nl points to a specific series of states of tiny logical gates, that are part of a memory disk in a server owned by some provider. That’s where Designblog resides in what you could call its latent, purely informational state. In this state Designblog is inaccessible for humans.

The human-facing capacity of the address points to a location on the WorldWideWeb. This address holds particular information on what it points to. In terms of content, it suggests its visitors to relate to what is behind the address as a time-stamped list of musings (a weblog) contextualized in the particular world of meanings known as design. But the address also ties the web location to a place on the physical globe, mobilizing some spatial –geographical- reference frame. It shows the blog is affiliated with an art academy: the Rietveld Academie in The Netherlands.

When a human calls upon that address – when it is clicked by you in this text, for instance – a command is sent to copy a section of that series of logical states from the server through fiber optic cables, through a couple of routers to the computer or phone where the click was performed. The browser on that computer (yours, that would be) than has the specific task and ability to allow that series or logical states to inform the screen of its computer to display what we have come to think of as the front page of Designblog.

 

Page

The ‘page’ is home turf for the graphically oriented. A two dimensional surface, that can passively hold various two-dimensional artifacts in a fixed relation to one another. The page was a helpful metaphor to be able to relate to the strangeness of networked information, as it was performed by snippets of code – a rewarding, but also frustrating metaphor for the graphically oriented: neither is there a real surface, nor is there a fixed two-dimensional relation between any artifact and any other. Still, although the page doesn’t exist anywhere but in your lazy perception, it doesn’t really hurt to think of Designblog as a collection of pages.
But there’s more…

The latent, machinic state is now activated. The address opened its front door, and revealed what performs not only as a page, but also like a place. An online, publicly accessible part of the Rietveld Academy, that indeed has some characteristics of a classroom.

 

Place

A place is an appropriated space. A location with layers of stories, traces of events. A place offers corners, furniture, a means to sit down and be there. A place ties to identity, to individual identities, or group identities. At places, relations become entangled. Anything can talk to who- or whatever also happens to be there. A place is somewhere you can be with your experience, somewhere to orient from. This possibility of being there, (which is different from ‘looking at’) this possible sensation of presence, subtly mobilizes a notion of partiality.

Over its years of existence Designblog has become a place with a deep accreted inside, a vast archive of contributions by Rietveld students: worded observations, found media-items, responses to assignments, to each others contributions, linked to each other, to other addresses on the web, clustered and flagged by tags.

Unlike a classroom, the inside of Designblog is at the same time its outside: the stuff inside is crawled and indexed by the bots of Google, that provide the endless amount of entry points for the querying audience. In this sense Designblog is like a Klein Bottle, an object with two-and-a-half dimensions, of which the outside and the inside are one unbroken surface.

Every corner of Designblog either links to some item in the vast non-dimensionality of the web, or is accessible from it. Things inside Designblog are not even closer to one another than to things accessible through other addresses. Everything  on the web exists at more or less the same distance from everything else. If this is a classroom, it is an extremely open classroom.

 

Space

Designblog has a lot of placeness, but clearly also still has endless space. To call it space pulls the attention to its not yet actualized potential. It brings to the front that whatever it is, it could house a great many future developments, without ever loosing that quality of potential. In the sense that any member of the blog can always open up a new empty page (a sub-address) to fill, Designblog performs as space. But this spaceness, because it is part of the web, has no particular kind of dimensionality to it.

 

Nest

Designblog is a collective, open archive, an accessible history of students’ online work. But to say (like you would say of an archive) that informational artifacts are ‘stored’ there would be misleading. The artifacts are not stored in its structure, they are its structure, as well as its decoration.

Like a birds nest is made of twigs, threads, leaves, wires, found things that are sufficiently twinable, Designblog is made of its twines. Also a nest is a place where one can land and fly off from. A nest is a place that holds up who dwell there, but that does not cover them. A nest offers place, but has no real inside. All that seems to hold for Designblog: as a groups’ nest it offers a place to land, to contribute informational twines to, and to fly off from.

 

Body language

When language deals with space and location, it stubbornly uses the body as implicit reference. The language of spatiality is about here or there, behind or in front, up or down and in or out. The web captured the human imagination through the metaphor of cyberspace. This spatial approach offered important and helpful familiarity, and has made the internet inhabitable, so to speak.

Spatial concepts have played and still play a crucial part in helping people to relate to networked computing. But insisting on spatial notions also fixes the relation between people and the online as a spatial one.

 

Time

And it is through the time-perspective – the fourth dimension– that other Designblog realities reveal themselves. Because the most essential aspects of Designblog are processes.

The emergence of Designblog, (as of all blogs) follows a time line, that would be one-dimensional if it didn’t fold in on itself, and looped to earlier contributions. Twining may be an apt practice by which to perceive the development of Designblog: both making and responding to what’s there, simultaneously creative and reactive.

Time is also the room in which learning takes place – the process of one thing informing another thing, the process of information, the raison d’être of a school.

 

Performing

All agents related to Designblog are engaged in some act of distinctly time-based performance. A performance of a for a particular audience – you.  Some of those acts come down to straightforward, unambiguous execution of tasks, others are more elaborate and creative.

Your computer or phone performs its web browser, for you. The web browser in turn performs the latent code of Designblog to make it active and accessible, again to you.

Designblog performs its fuzzily structured content, never showing more than a glimpse of its vastly twined labyrinthine body. It responds to your clicks by turning a differently dressed little facade, by offering a new shadowy inroad, or by suddenly pointing a spotlight in your eyes.

Members perform the mysterious part of author – transforming found things into new source material. They create independent, informative agents of text or (moving) image, that in their turn perform the act of information on your sense organs.

And the members add tags to their agents, to suggest similarities or difference between their agents to you. These tags perform as frames through which to move with your mind, frames that you put on to shape your perception. Every one of those tags performs like one of n dimensions along which the content of Designblog can be morphed, when you travel along it. Although it is not so much you who travels through Designblog, it is more that Designblog travels through your screen – you stay put, Designblog performs the moves.

But you are not undergoing this passively. You are the last performer, performing the score of Designblog, following the by-roads and sideways. By your clicking you act upon your pseudo-conscious choices about what material is allowed to inform your perception. Your clicks and non-clicks manifest your own perspective in the material of Designblog.

 

Klaas Kuitenbrouwer augustus – september 2014

(written for the occasion of "WORDPLAY", the presentation of the online artefact Designblog at the Graphic Design Biennial in Brno, Czech Republic.)

 

Memorization


Tuesday, May 6, 2014

How does the history of browsing stay in your memory?
How do we perceive the visual experience of websites which are opening up in new windows?
I question myself and try to observe my behavior when I am browsing around Internet webs. How do I chose the website and what makes me choose them? What determines if I like to stay on the page and look properly through it or if I click to the next page?
What is my choice based on? What visual experience do I get? What videos do I chose to click on? Is it exiting enough to look what is next? I think most of my internet browsing is based on visual experience, except particular situations when I am looking for certain subjects, where the context is more important than the visual experience.
Almost every morning, when I am starting my day, like a due during the breakfast I check my mailbox, read the news and brows around interesting blogs . Mostly they are about music, art, fashion,  news, or just whatever captures my eye.
“Capture my eyes” what are they capturing exactly? I think it is the matter of personal choice, what color, forms, shapes you are attracted to.
I find out that my choice of webpage is purely based on visual impression and it does not necessarily have anything to do with content. After I browse trough what stays in my memory and for how long?  What do I keep in my mind and what can easily be forgotten?

 

I choose to open Designblog for the first time, looked at the first page which comes out and then close it in 1 minute. I sketched my first impression immediately, what was there? Few geometrical shapes, and bright attractive colors this was the most catchy and noteworthy things.

browsing-history-1_redu

 

Next step, I simply let myself browse for half an hour, without forcing myself to memorize, reading most interesting things, watching concerning videos or look at images and illustrate my memories. As a result I had same expressive geometrical shapes and specifically recognizable colors, also some words or sentences from the context.
What was my experience? Well even if I illustrate and was attracted by colors, mostly I memorize the context of the posts and the idea what it was about.

30-min-browsing-reading-watching_redu

 

After this I browsed around in 1 page for fifteen minutes

browsing_15 min_3_redu

 

Finaly I watched a video, not paying attention to the surroundings

watching_video_4_redu

rapid data reproduction


Monday, April 7, 2014

 

SDesignblog_IndexAdresses_jpg

Looking at the history of my browsing, I find the fact that every page and every single piece of data on the design blog has its own little index/address very interesting. I feel like internet lives its own life. It is very much like a non stop growing organism and it is also expanding so fast. The designblog is a little part of that organism/creator. This screenshot shows the contrast between that short moment of browsing through the designblog and the very rapid data reproduction during that short moment.

#wow


Sunday, April 6, 2014

#interesting #easytofollow #slowfashion #slowcouture #painted #fashioncollective #processing #newfashionideology #slower #sublimitedfashion #wellwritten #spendingtime #takingtime #doingnothing #importantnothing #reflecting #understandable #makingbyhand #inspiring #bulgarianneedlepoint #timeisgold #nomultitasking #notime #forgottentechniques #hybridfashion #meditation #japanisetradition #repairclothes #workshop #brokenclothes #makingnew #startingagain #somethingdifferent #notcategorizing #ontheedgeoffashion #nocatwalk #nocollections #notrends #work #constantchange #fragility #history #inprocess #manydesigners #garmentgrows #noplans #collaborativefashion #story #handmade #value #questioningmoney #timeinvestment #imformative #links #endwithmusic #personalexperience #balanced #explained #2013 #research

#rediscover

#fashionwithagoldtread

 

Wendingen as Layout and Form


Wednesday, April 2, 2014

[X]

One of the most immediate impressions one has of a Wendingen publication is of the format. It is ironically a very stout and conventional square shape, while not being a standard Din format. This is obviously a considered format, one which was chosen so as to fulfill a specific requirement. Similarly, once the publication is opened, the considerations of lay-outing the page as well as the type, is as immediate. The shortening of the printed area of the page reverts the visual shape of the page back to a more common rectangular format. The lay-outing of the type too is interesting as it plays along a similar functionality. With colour fields being constructed from smaller sets of shapes aligned together. This back and forth in format and form is something that may be interesting to play with on a digital platform such as a a basic webpage, where format differs from screen to screen, and browser to browser. Although this is fairly standardized, there is some variation. The lay-outing of individual elements in HTML then allows for a chance to reformat the page as desired by the user. While this is in no means a finished or particularly useful webpage, a more playful and relevant investigation into these issues is at least a potentially good starting point.

ON DESIGN EDUCATION


Thursday, February 6, 2014

 

The bricks manifesto is a collaborative version
of ‘this is (not) a manifesto’ to bring people together
to discuss their education vision during DDW 2012.9

tumblr_inline_ms8phbzUvw1qz4rgp

 

UnBornLab
Presented at the graduation show of the Design Academy Eindhoven during Dutch Design Week 2013, UnBornLab is a masters project, initiated by Eugenie de Lariviere, looking at design education from a design student’s perspective.

It was important for me to understand education from my own perspective; as a student and a designer.
Mixing both a field research on a local level, and an academic research on a more ‘global level (that is the European level)I felt the need to always bring the theoretical part into practice, by organizing workshops, discussions, lectures, interviews (etc), in order to grasp an understanding of the big notion that is education.

One way to do so was to analyze how the system functions. I was able to get an overview of it by breaking it down into four ‘elements’, which together, represent the main ‘pillars’ forming our schools. These four elements being; community, structure, content and environment, the interactions they have together shapes the different academic institutions we know of.

(For example: Structure = Content implies that if structure makes content, it induces a top-down approach of knowledge, raising the question of knowledge accreditation, knowledge hierarchy, as well as of formal vs. informal knowledge. Whereas Content = Structure implies that if knowledge forms structure it leads to a more bottom up approach of producing and sharing knowledge for example; crowd source and open source systems. The same goes with structure = community vs. community = structure and so on.)

To communicate the concept clearly, I visualized these methods of the ‘four elements’ by quickly sketching them into volumes. It was once again a means of bringing the theory into practice by giving shape to the research. Making it physical also enabled me to reach people who did not feel strongly about the subject.

COMMUNITY-CONTENT_redu CONTENT-COMMUNITY_redu

Community = Content  vs.  Content = Community

 

Following on the idea of ‘rethinking’ education from a student’s perspective, I chose to look further on recent shifts in the relationship between ‘content’ and ‘community’, focusing on students as the bearer of contemporary knowledge.

With the faster availability of information the world is transforming at a greater pace and students are often proven to be quicker to adapt to these changes, may they be social, economical, political (etc). The content they bring in the school, as an addition to the curriculum, comes to show more applicability regarding the world they evolve in. In this process, schools go from being knowledge distributors to becoming intermediate spaces where a dynamic cross-pollination of knowledge happens.

The UnBornLab functions as an experiment to document students’ working processes as the basis for renewing design curricula.
The first step of the project was a blog to bring student’s current research (in this case their thesis topics) outside of schools.

DAE-BLOG

DAE Masters Blog

 

Believing in the importance of students’ self-taught expertise as a school’s temporary knowledge, the idea evolved in the motivation to create a dynamic archive of this knowledge by building a self-generating library of past researches.

Through a series of short video-interviews students present their work, focusing on the research rather than the outcome. Considering students as temporary ‘experts’ of their subjects, the videos can be seen as short introductions on given design topics. One topic leading to another UnBornLab intends to be the start of a dynamic knowledge database of ‘UnBorn’ designers.

UnBornLab_siteS_screenshot

 

Experiments With Truth


Wednesday, January 18, 2012

 

Experiments with Truth: An encyclopedia of the modern art.

 

By experimenting in diversity within styles, themes and waves, we are able to see beyond the frame within several art movements.

This encyclopedia is build up out of several factors which are based on retrospectives of “modern art” (paintings, sculptures and architecture).

Different aspects of these movements are interesting throughout time. From the past till the present we are able to calculate at least 200 different waves/movements fixated within the modern and authentic art scale.

 

 

For instance:

Avant Garde – Impressionism – Neo Impressionism – Art-Nouveau – Symbolism – Post Impressionism – Jugendstill – Fauvism – Expressionism and so on

 

Faking of paintings is a quite interesting theory, and we have to be carefully by finding a truly result. A lot of works can be seen as an original, but this isn’t the actual case.

The famous faker: Elmyr de Hory (A Hungarian painter and art forger that claimed to be the one that sold over thousand works to support art galleries all over the world) is one of the persons that can be seen as a truly highlighted subject throughout the history!

 

In this book 200 paintings are not only the fixation point of art waves and movements, but also the experimenting point of view is important throughout the works of art, because the real question will always be: are they fake or are they real?

 

An amount of works are categorized in a chronological alphabet, nearly fully focused on paintings, sculptures and architecture from the modern time.

Theories are also involved in the book. From Fakers like Elmyr to a painter-movement like Der Blaue Reiter.

 

From 1860 till the year 2012 we are still busy with theories about artists and fixation on the main essences.

 

In the book there is also a formulation about important collections from the artist, also published several book titles, revealing name of the author, title and date, that are categorized within the movement. Also quotes written by an artists that was connected to the mentioned wave/movement. Some quotes are written by “Situationists” like: Guy Debord and Isidore Isou. Also different manifesto’s are mentioned from for instance: Hugo Ball (Dadaist) and Luigi Russolo (Futurist).

 

In short: Interesting views on the visualized and textual context of the art-world!

this post is part of he subjective library project "Unopened Book"
the book can be found at the Rietveld library : catalog no : 705.8-doc-11 IV

Discussing Hella Jongerius


Monday, February 28, 2011

Na mijn eerste kennismaking met het werk van Hella Jongerius had ik direct een hele sterke mening gevormd.
Gaandeweg ik aan het schrijven was hoe ongelofelijk simpel ik haar werk vond zoals bijvoorbeeld een door haar ontworpen print voor een sneaker moest ik toch telkens mijn mening bijstellen.

Zodoende ben ik zeven keer overnieuw begonnen. Telkens uit een verschillend standpunt. Ik moest en zou duidelijk maken hoe ongelofelijk slecht ik haar werk vond. Maar telkens naarmate ik me meer en meer verdiepte bleek ik ongelijk te hebben.

Ik vond bijvoorbeeld uit dat wanneer ik in google: “Hella Jongerius kunst” intikte 32.400 resultaten kreeg. En wanneer ik: “Hella Jongerius design” intikte 163.000 resultaten kreeg. Ook op Facebook wordt zij twee keer onder design genoemd en niet onder kunst. Ook verschillende zoektermen in google geven duidelijk meer resultaten wanneer Hella Jongerius met zoekterm “design” word gebruikt.

Zo besloot ik: “Hella Jongerius moest uit het (kunst)museum.” Na verder research over design in kunst musea bleek het Boijmans van Beuningen zelfs vrij bekend is om de manier waarmee zij design een plek in het museum geven. Een designer (Wim Crouwel) was zelf in de jaren 90tig diresteur ervan. Daarbij bleek ook dat Jongerius zichzelf niet zo zeer een kunstenaar of designer noemt maar verschillende dingen op verschillende manieren benaderd. Het kwam er dus op neer dat Jongerius werk doordacht is. Iets meer probeert dan alleen maar design te zijn.

Zo kwam ik telkens mezelf weer tegen. En moest ik toch weer nuanceren. Door telkens opnieuw te beginnen en zoveel verschillende standpunten te hebben ingenomen ben ik heel veel te weten gekomen over Jongerius.

Nog steeds staat een groot deel van Jongerius werk me tegen. Maar wat ik wel ben gaan zien is dat ze niet alleen commercieel werk maakt of veel geld probeert te verdienen met reproducties. Wat ze doet komt wel degelijk ergens vandaan. Jongerius gaat te werk als een kunstenares en vormt vanuit daar vaak toch functionele objecten of gebruiksvoorwerpen. Dit begint al in het ontwerp proces. Ze stelt zo nog meer eisen als iemand die enkel vanuit kunst of enkel vanuit design beoordeeld. Designers die zich begeven in de kunstwereld worden geacht autonoom te kunnen werken met een eigen handschrift en/of thematiek. Maar tegelijk moeten ze aanvoelen wat de markt wil. Toch lukt Jongerius dit erg goed. En voert ze daarnaast een interessant onderzoek uit naar de cross-over tussen deze twee werelden die steeds vaker hand in hand gaan.

In mijn research naar Hella Jongerius en design in de kunstwereld kwam ik op een blog geschreven door “deDeurs” Naar aanleiding hiervan ontstond een discussie…

(more…)


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